From what we read in the general media, it seems like almost everyone felt the atomic bombings of Japan were necessary. Aren't the people who disagree with those actions just trying to find fault with America?

Positions listed refer to WWII positions.

~~~DWIGHT EISENHOWER

"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

-- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:

"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

-- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441

~~~HERBERT HOOVER

On May 28, 1945, Hoover visited President Truman and suggested a way to end the Pacific war quickly: "I am convinced that if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan - tell them they can have their Emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists - you'll get a peace in Japan - you'll have both wars over."

On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hoover wrote to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul."

-- quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 635

"...the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945...up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; ...if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs."

Hoover biographer Richard Norton Smith has written: "Use of the bomb had besmirched America's reputation, he [Hoover] told friends. It ought to have been described in graphic terms before being flung out into the sky over Japan."

In early May of 1946 Hoover met with General Douglas MacArthur. Hoover recorded in his diary, "I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria."

-- Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 350-351

~~~GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR

MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: "...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

On August 6, 1945, the world dramatically entered the atomic age: without either warning or precedent, an American plane dropped a single nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion utterly destroyed more than four square miles of the city center. About about 90,000 people were killed immediately; another 40,000 were injured, many of whom died in protracted agony from radiation sickness. Three days later, a second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki killed some 37,000 people and injured another 43,000. Together the two bombs eventually killed an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians.

Between the two bombings, Soviet Russia joined the United States in war against Japan. Under strong US prodding, Stalin broke his regime's 1941 non-aggression treaty with Tokyo. On the same day that Nagasaki was destroyed, Soviet troops began pouring into Manchuria, overwhelming Japanese forces there. Although Soviet participation did little or nothing to change the military outcome of the war, Moscow benefitted enormously from joining the conflict.

In a broadcast from Tokyo the next day, August 10, the Japanese government announced its readiness to accept the joint American-British "unconditional surrender" declaration of Potsdam, "with the understanding that the said declaration does not compromise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler."

A day later came the American reply, which included these words: "From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the State shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers." Finally, on August 14, the Japanese formally accepted the provisions of the Potsdam declaration, and a "cease fire" was announced. On September 2, Japanese envoys signed the instrument of surrender aboard the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

A Beaten Country

Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan's air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.

What was left of Japan's factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.

On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 "Superfortress" bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo's commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 "Superfortress" planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.

Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were "driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age." Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s."

Japan Seeks Peace

Months before the end of the war, Japan's leaders recognized that defeat was inevitable. In April 1945 a new government headed by Kantaro Suzuki took office with the mission of ending the war. When Germany capitulated in early May, the Japanese understood that the British and Americans would now direct the full fury of their awesome military power exclusively against them.

American officials, having long since broken Japan's secret codes, knew from intercepted messages that the country's leaders were seeking to end the war on terms as favorable as possible. Details of these efforts were known from decoded secret communications between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and Japanese diplomats abroad.

Sometimes, something happens that is so awful that we find ourselves rationalizing it, talking as if it had to happen, to make ourselves feel better about the horrible event. For many people, I believe, President Truman's dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, were two such events. After all, if the leader of arguably the freest country in the world decided to drop those bombs, he had to have a good reason, didn't he? I grew up in Canada thinking that, horrible as it was, dropping the atomic bombs on those two cities was justified. Although I never believed that the people those bombs killed were mainly guilty people, I could at least tell myself that many more innocent people, including American military conscripts, would have been killed had the bombs not been dropped. But then I started to investigate. On the basis of that investigation, I have concluded that dropping the bomb was not necessary and caused, on net, tens of thousands, and possibly more than a hundred thousand, more deaths than were necessary.

What I write below will not come as a surprise to those who are particularly well-informed about the issue: the Gar Alperovitzes, Barton Bernsteins, Dennis Wainstocks, and Ralph Raicos of the world. But it did come as a surprise to me and will surprise, I believe, many of the people reading this article. There were four surprises: (1) how Truman himself couldn't seem to keep his story straight about why he dropped the bomb and even whom he dropped the first one on; (2) how strong the opinion was among the informed, including many military and political leaders, against dropping the bomb; (3) how strong a case can be made that the Japanese government was about to surrender and that the U.S. insistence on unconditional surrender had already delayed their surrender for months; and (4) how the proponents of dropping the bomb systematically and successfully convinced Americans that dropping the bomb saved many American lives. On the third issue, in particular, I highlight a May 1945 memo to President Truman from former President Herbert Hoover, the person who founded the Hoover Institution, at which I am proudly, given his views on this, a research fellow.

This extremely important document is one of the last major pieces of the puzzle explaining American and British roles in the August 1953 coup against Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadeq. Written in March 1954 by Donald Wilber, one of the operation’s chief planners, the 200-page document is essentially an after-action report, apparently based in part on agency cable traffic and Wilber’s interviews with agents who had been on the ground in Iran as the operation lurched to its conclusion.

Long-sought by historians, the Wilber history is all the more valuable because it is one of the relatively few documents that still exists after an unknown quantity of materials was destroyed by CIA operatives – reportedly “routinely” – in the 1960s, according to former CIA Director James Woolsey. However, according to an investigation by the National Archives and Records Administration, released in March 2000, “no schedules in effect during the period 1959-1963 provided for the disposal of records related to covert actions and, therefore, the destruction of records related to Iran was unauthorized.” (p. 22) The CIA now says that about 1,000 pages of documentation remain locked in agency vaults.

During the 1990s, three successive CIA heads pledged to review and release historically valuable materials on this and 10 other widely-known covert operations from the period of the Cold War, but in 1998, citing resource restrictions, current Director George Tenet reneged on these promises, a decision which prompted the National Security Archive to file a lawsuit in 1999 for this history of the 1953 operation and one other that is known to exist. So far, the CIA has effectively refused to declassify either document, releasing just one sentence out of 339 pages at issue. That sentence reads: “Headquarters spent a day featured by depression and despair.” In a sworn statement by William McNair, the information review officer for the CIA’s directorate of operations, McNair claimed that release of any other part of this document other than the one line that had previously appeared in Wilber’s memoirs, would “reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security of the United States.” Clearly, the “former official” who gave this document to The New York Times disagreed with McNair, and we suspect you will too, once you read this for yourself. The case is currently pending before a federal judge. (See related item on this site: “Archive Wins Freedom of Information Ruling Versus CIA”)

When Iranians took U.S. officials hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, Americans were mystified and angry, not being able to comprehend how Iranians could be so hateful toward U.S. officials, especially since the U.S. government had been so supportive of the shah of Iran for some 25 years. What the American people failed to realize is that the deep anger and hatred that the Iranian people had in 1979 against the U.S. government was rooted in a horrible, anti-democratic act that the U.S. government committed in 1953. That was the year the CIA secretly and surreptitiously ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, a man named Mohammad Mossadegh, from power, followed by the U.S. government’s ardent support of the shah of Iran’s dictatorship for the next 25 years.

Today, very few Americans have ever heard of Mohammad Mossadegh, but that wasn’t the case in 1953. At that time, Mossadegh was one of the most famous figures in the world. Here’s the way veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer decribes him in his book All the Shah’s Men:

In his time, Mohammad Mossadegh was a titanic figure. He shook an empire and changed the world. People everywhere knew his name. World leaders sought to influence him and later to depose him. No one was surprised when Time magazine chose him over Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Winston Churchill as its Man of the Year for 1951.

(Kinzer’s book, published in 2003, is an excellent account of the CIA coup; much of this article is based on his book.)

There were two major problems with Mossadegh, however, as far as both the British and American governments were concerned. First, as an ardent nationalist he was a driving force behind an Iranian attempt to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British company that had held a monopoly on the production and sale of Iranian oil since the early part of the 20th century. Second, fiercely independent, Mossadegh refused to do the bidding of the U.S. government, which by this time had become fearful that Mossadegh might align Iran with America’s World War II ally and post–World War II enemy, the Soviet Union.

As Kinzer puts it,

Historic as Mossadegh’s rise to power was for Iranians, it was at least as stunning for the British. They were used to manipulating Iranian prime ministers like chess pieces, and now, suddenly, they faced one who seemed to hate them....

(U.S. presidential envoy Averell) Harriman paid a call on the Shah before leaving Tehran, and during their meeting he made a discreet suggestion. Since Mossadegh was making it impossible to resolve the (Anglo-American Oil Company) crisis on a basis acceptable to the West, he said, Mossadegh might have to be removed. Harriman knew the Shah had no way of removing Mossadegh at that moment. By bringing up the subject, however, he foreshadowed American involvement in the coup two years later.

The 1953 CIA coup in Iran was named “Operation Ajax” and was engineered by a CIA agent named Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. Capitalizing on the oil-nationalization showdown between Iran and Great Britain, which had thrown Iran into chaos and crisis, Kermit Roosevelt skillfully used a combination of bribery of Iranian military officials and CIA-engendered street protests to pull off the coup.

The first stage of the coup, however, was unsuccessful, and the shah, who had partnered with the CIA to oust Mossadegh from office, fled Tehran in fear of his life. However, in the second stage of the coup a few days later, the CIA achieved its goal, enabling the shah to return to Iran in triumph ... and with a subsequent 25-year, U.S.-supported dictatorship, which included one of the world’s most terrifying and torturous secret police, the Savak.

For years, the U.S. government, including the CIA, kept what it had done in Iran secret from the American people and the world, although the Iranian people long suspected CIA involvement. U.S. officials, not surprisingly, considered the operation one of their greatest foreign-policy successes ... until, that is, the enormous convulsion that rocked Iranian society with the violent ouster of the shah and the installation of a virulently anti-American Islamic regime in 1979.

It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of anger and hatred that the Iranian people had for the U.S. government in 1979, not only because their world-famous democratically elected prime minister had been ousted by the CIA but also for having had to live for the following 25 years under a brutal and torturous dictatorship, a U.S.-government-supported dictatorship that also offended many Iranians with its policies of Westernization. In fact, the reason that the Iranian students took control of the U.S. embassy after the violent ouster of the shah in 1979 was their genuine fear that the U.S. government would repeat what it had done in 1953.

Imagine, for example, that it turned out that a foreign regime had secretly and surreptitiously ousted President Kennedy from office because of his refusal to do the bidding of that foreign regime. What would have been the response of the American people toward that government?

Bush authorizes group formerly headed by alleged 9/11 mastermind to be bankrolled & armed by CIA for covert regime change

Paul Joseph Watson & Steve WatsonPrison PlanetMonday, May 28, 2007

Recent revelations illustrating the fact that the U.S. government is using a Sunni Al-Qaeda terrorist group formerly headed by the alleged mastermind of 9/11 to carry out bombings in Iran undermines the entire war on terror as a monumental hoax that is being exploited purely to realize a geopolitical agenda.

"President George W Bush has given the CIA approval to launch covert "black" operations to achieve regime change in Iran, intelligence sources have revealed. Mr Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilise, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs."

"The CIA is giving arms-length support, supplying money and weapons, to an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, which has conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan," the London Telegraph reported yesterday.

Jundullah is a Sunni Al-Qaeda offshoot organization that was formerly headed by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Even if you believe the official story of 9/11 to the letter, the fact that Bush has personally authorized U.S. support for this group completely dismantles the facade of the war on terror.

The group has been blamed for a number of bombings inside Iran aimed at destabilizing Ahmadinejad's government and is also active in Pakistan, having been fingered for its involvement in attacks on police stations and car bombings at the Pakistan-US Cultural Center in 2004.

The U.S. government is arming and directing a Sunni Al-Qaeda group to carry out bombings in Iran and yet Bush has the temerity to grandstand during his Rose Garden speech last week and wave the Al-Qaeda bogeyman to strike the fear of God into American citizens.

"As to al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda is going to fight us wherever we are. That's their strategy. Their strategy is to drive us out of the Middle East. They have made it abundantly clear what they want. They want to establish a caliphate. They want to spread their ideology. They want safe haven from which to launch attacks. They're willing to kill the innocent to achieve their objectives, and they will fight us. And the fundamental question is, will we fight them? I have made the decision to do so. I believe that the best way to protect us in this war on terror is to fight them," Bush said on Thursday.

Arms cache belonging to Jundullah - the Sunni Al-Qaeda terrorist group beingfunded by the CIA with President Bush's approval.

But in the world of newspeak and the lowest common denominator propaganda that cloaks the real agenda of the "war on terror", anyone who rises up against occupation, be it a kid who throws a rock in Baghdad or a car bombing on behalf of an increasingly Shiite-led insurgency, the natural enemies of the Sunni "Al-Qaeda," are terrorists and are Al-Qaeda members.

A cruel irony exists whereby anyone and everyone who opposes military occupation is smeared as an Al-Qaeda terrorist and yet the only real Al-Qaeda terrorists are being bankrolled, armed and directed by the CIA itself, with Bush's explicit approval.

Indeed it does, and what disgusts me most of all is that so many people have to be dragged kicking-and-screaming into acknowledging each and every instance of lies and deception on the part of both the banker-owned political establishment and the shills and intellectual gatekeepers in the corporate whore "news" media who lovingly serve that establishment.

With regard to Iran, one of the lies that the warmongering, Israeli government-worshipping neocrazies and establishment liberals love to parrot (in their desperate attempt to justify launching yet another of their terroristic wars of aggression) is that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "Israel must be wiped off the map."

Experts confirm that Iran's president did not call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'. Reports that he did serve to strengthen western hawks.

by Jonathan Steele guardian.co.ukJune 14, 2006

My recent comment piece explaining how Iran's president was badly misquoted when he allegedly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" has caused a welcome little storm. The phrase has been seized on by western and Israeli hawks to re-double suspicions of the Iranian government's intentions, so it is important to get the truth of what he really said.

I took my translation - "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" - from the indefatigable Professor Juan Cole's website where it has been for several weeks.

But it seems to be mainly thanks to the Guardian giving it prominence that the New York Times, which was one of the first papers to misquote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came out on Sunday with a defensive piece attempting to justify its reporter's original "wiped off the map" translation. (By the way, for Farsi speakers the original version is available here.)

Joining the "off the map" crowd is David Aaronovitch, a columnist on the Times (of London), who attacked my analysis yesterday. I won't waste time on him since his knowledge of Farsi is as minimal as that of his Latin. The poor man thinks the plural of casus belli is casi belli, unaware that casus is fourth declension with the plural casus (long u).

The New York Times's Ethan Bronner and Nazila Fathi, one of the paper's Tehran staff, make a more serious case. They consulted several sources in Tehran. "Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran's most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say 'wipe off' or 'wipe away' is more accurate than 'vanish' because the Persian verb is active and transitive," Bronner writes.

The New York Times goes on: "The second translation issue concerns the word 'map'. Khomeini's words were abstract: 'Sahneh roozgar.' Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as 'map', and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not 'Sahneh roozgar' but 'Safheh roozgar', meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word 'map' again."

This, in my view, is the crucial point and I'm glad the NYT accepts that the word "map" was not used by Ahmadinejad. (By the way, the Wikipedia entry on the controversy gets the NYT wrong, claiming falsely that Ethan Bronner "concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map".)

If the Iranian president made a mistake and used "safheh" rather than "sahneh", that is of little moment. A native English speaker could equally confuse "stage of history" with "page of history". The significant issue is that both phrases refer to time rather than place. As I wrote in my original post, the Iranian president was expressing a vague wish for the future. He was not threatening an Iranian-initiated war to remove Israeli control over Jerusalem.

Is Iran's President Really a Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who has threatened to "wipe Israel off the map"?

by Virginia TilleyCounterPunchAugust 28, 2006

In this frightening mess in the Middle East, let's get one thing straight. Iran is not threatening Israel with destruction. Iran's president has not threatened any action against Israel. Over and over, we hear that Iran is clearly "committed to annihilating Israel" because the "mad" or "reckless" or "hard-line" President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel. But every supposed quote, every supposed instance of his doing so, is wrong.

The most infamous quote, "Israel must be wiped off the map", is the most glaringly wrong. In his October 2005 speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad never used the word "map" or the term "wiped off". According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole and even right-wing services like MEMRI, what he actually said was "this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

What did he mean? In this speech to an annual anti-Zionist conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad was being prophetic, not threatening. He was citing Imam Khomeini, who said this line in the 1980s (a period when Israel was actually selling arms to Iran, so apparently it was not viewed as so ghastly then). Mr. Ahmadinejad had just reminded his audience that the Shah's regime, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein had all seemed enormously powerful and immovable, yet the first two had vanished almost beyond recall and the third now languished in prison. So, too, the "occupying regime" in Jerusalem would someday be gone. His message was, in essence, "This too shall pass."

Across the world, a dangerous rumor has spread that could have catastrophic implications. According to legend, Iran's President has threatened to destroy Israel, or, to quote the misquote, "Israel must be wiped off the map". Contrary to popular belief, this statement was never made, as the following article will prove.

BACKGROUND:

On Tuesday, October 25th, 2005 at the Ministry of Interior conference hall in Tehran, newly elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at a program, reportedly attended by thousands, titled "The World Without Zionism". Large posters surrounding him displayed this title prominently in English, obviously for the benefit of the international press. Below the poster's title was a slick graphic depicting an hour glass containing planet Earth at its top. Two small round orbs representing the United States and Israel are shown falling through the hour glass' narrow neck and crashing to the bottom.

Before we get to the infamous remark, it's important to note that the "quote" in question was itself a quote— they are the words of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Revolution. Although he quoted Khomeini to affirm his own position on Zionism, the actual words belong to Khomeini and not Ahmadinejad. Thus, Ahmadinejad has essentially been credited (or blamed) for a quote that is not only unoriginal, but represents a viewpoint already in place well before he ever took office.

THE ACTUAL QUOTE:

So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in farsi:

That passage will mean nothing to most people, but one word might ring a bell: rezhim-e. It is the word "Regime", pronounced just like the English word with an extra "eh" sound at the end. Ahmadinejad did not refer to Israel the country or Israel the land mass, but the Israeli regime. This is a vastly significant distinction, as one cannot wipe a regime off the map. Ahmadinejad does not even refer to Israel by name, he instead uses the specific phrase "rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods" (regime occupying Jerusalem).

So this raises the question.. what exactly did he want "wiped from the map"? The answer is: nothing. That's because the word "map" was never used. The Persian word for map, "nagsheh", is not contained anywhere in his original farsi quote, or, for that matter, anywhere in his entire speech. Nor was the western phrase "wipe out" ever said. Yet we are led to believe that Iran's President threatened to "wipe Israel off the map", despite never having uttered the words "map", "wipe out" or even "Israel".

What Ahmadinejad really said and why this broken record is just another ad slogan for war

by Paul Joseph WatsonPrison PlanetJanuary 26, 2007

Barely a day goes by that one can avoid reading or hearing yet another Israeli, American or British warhawk regurgitate the broken record that Iran's President Ahmadinejad threatened to "wipe Israel off the map," framed in the ridiculous context that Israelis are being targeted for a second holocaust. This baseless rallying call for conflict holds about as much credibility as Dick Cheney's assertion that Saddam Hussein was planning to light up American skies with mushroom clouds.

Today it's the turn of would-be future British Prime Minister David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, who repeated the "wipe Israel off he map" fraud in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, using it to qualify his refusal to rule out a military strike on Iran under a Tory government.

Did Ahmadinejad really threaten to "wipe Israel off the map" or is this phrase just another jingoistic brand slogan for selling the next war in the Middle East?

The devil is in the detail, wiping Israel off the map suggests a physical genocidal assault, a literal population relocation or elimination akin to what the Nazis did. According to numerous different translations, Ahmadinejad never used the word "map," instead his statement was in the context of time and applied to the Zionist regime occupying Jerusalem. Ahmadinejad was expressing his future hope that the Zionist regime in Israel would fall, not that Iran was going to physically annex the country and its population.

To claim Ahmadinejad has issued a rallying cry to ethnically cleanse Israel is akin to saying that Churchill wanted to murder all Germans when he stated his desire to crush the Nazis. This is about the demise of a corrupt occupying power, not the deaths of millions of innocent people.

The Guardian's Jonathan Steele cites four different translations, from professors to the BBC to the New York Times and even pro-Israel news outlets, in none of those translations is the word "map" used. The closest translation to what the Iranian President actually said is, "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time," or a narrow relative thereof. In no version is the word "map" used or a context of mass genocide or hostile military action even hinted at.

In his latest statements, President Obama has expressively warned Iran against an imminent nuclear strike. The surprising remarks by the politician who snatched the Nobel Peace Prize for his conciliatory stance in recent years, violated the UN Charter and astounded public opinion.

"The continued presence of all options on the table"; this is the disappointing message which a Nobel Peace Prize laureate dispatches internationally. In his latest interview with CBS news, American President Barack Obama refused to rule out the possibility of a military strike against Iran by harking back to the famous catchphrase of former U.S. President George W. Bush who once devised, regarding Iran's nuclear program, the popular sentence of "all options are on the table".

Putting the quality and quantity of these options aside, the very "table" on which the options should be placed is as well a matter of controversy. Who is in the position to decide the destiny of Iran's nuclear program? Which table is the U.S. President referring to? What's wrong with Iran's nuclear program in lieu of which a 70-million nation should go on with crippling sanctions, continued threats of military strike, isolation and economic embargo? What's the definite answer to the simple question that "why should the U.S., France and Israel possess nuclear weapons"? Which one is more offensive and violent? Iran's nuclear program which has been demonstrated again and again that does not have anything to do with military purposes, or the adventurous, aggressive trajectory Washington and its European allies have begun to go across?

Robert Parry, an award-winning American investigative journalist austerely answers the questions we have in mind. In an April 2 article in Consortium News, he notes: "if two countries with powerful nuclear arsenals were openly musing about attacking a third country over mere suspicions that it might want to join the nuclear club, we'd tend to sympathize with the non-nuclear underdog as the victim of bullying and possible aggression."

As Robert Parry notes, the "bomb bomb Iran Parlor Game" has much to do with the regular psychological operations the U.S. government ruthlessly directs against its victims and it has been seen several times during the post-World War II era that the U.S. government has resorted to the most brutal methods of black propaganda to demonize and demoralize its opponents.

In order to thwart Iran's efforts to achieve the zeniths of high technology and prevent the country from becoming an influential player in the Persian Gulf region and beyond, Washington has mobilized a large number of conservative think-tanks and pundits to direct psychological warfare against Iran multilaterally. Although the New York Times by itself suffices to wage a spotless and perfect psy-op by running misleading and untruthful articles which get circulated, syndicated and believed globally, numerous websites, blogs and community portals have also been activated to function as the podium of White House so as to disseminate illusive and deceptive stories regularly and misrepresent what's happening in Iran.

Over the past three decades and especially following the eruption of nuclear dispute with Iran, U.S. has been carrying out media operations to incite anti-Iranian sentiments vigorously. Some recent efforts include the establishment of websites such as "United Against Nuclear Iran" and the production of Hollywood-sponsored movies "300" and "The Wrestler".

The American psychological warfare, however, is not limited to mainstream media outlets, NY Times and Fox News-like stuff, campaign websites and TV shows. A number of bloggers also have been mobilized to take part in the cyber maneuver against Iran. It means that the wave of American psychological operation against Iran has become so extensive and far-reaching that even involves bloggers and independent commentators who run e-zines and online publications.

Above all, carrying out psychological operations is one of the most sensitive and delicate responsibilities of the U.S. Army, CIA's Special Activities Division (SAD) and National Clandestine Service (NCS). SAD is in charge of providing the U.S. President with "special" options where diplomacy and military action is likely to fail. U.S. President has the authority to order the commencement of a new clandestine operation whenever necessary. Covert and intangible intervention in foreign elections is one of the main tasks of SAD. It also carries out missions to undermine or even overthrow a regime which does not comply with the interests of the U.S. administration. SAD has a long history of carrying out inconceivable and paralyzing missions of psychological propaganda against different countries including Bolivia, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

In Iran, where people still remember the bitter memory of U.S.-backed coup d'etat of 1953 which brought down the democratic government of Dr. Mosaddeq and inaugurated the tyranny of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, SAD has accomplished numerous operations, several of which have been revealed by the investigative journalists.

NEW YORK – The nation’s top military officer said Sunday that military options existed to try to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon but that diplomatic efforts were the best way forward now.

“We in the Pentagon, we plan for contingencies all the time, and certainly there are options which exist” for dealing with the Iran nuclear threat militarily, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a forum at Columbia University in New York.

He said that his “worry about Iran achieving a nuclear weapons capability” is that other states in the region will seek nuclear arms of their own.

Cheney, Neocons Considered Killing Americans in Pretext to Attack Iran

Kurt NimmoInfowarsJuly 31, 2008

In the video here, taped at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh reveals how the neocons convened around Dick Cheney and brainstormed ways to kick off World War IV, as they fondly call their pet project to take out the Muslims and foment a contrived “clash of civilizations.”

According to Hersh, this meeting occurred after the neocons failed miserably to stage a rehashed version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Strait of Hormuz, mostly because it is no longer 1964 and such Big Lies — thanks to the internet and bloggers — are far more difficult to float. “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there,” quipped LBJ about the imaginary act of North Vietnamese boats supposedly attacking U.S. ships, leading to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and undeclared war in Southeast Asia, ultimately resulting in the death of nearly 60,000 Americans and around 3 million Southeast Asians.

In an exclusive Think Progress story, we learn the meeting took place in Cheney’s office and the subject on the table was “how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” part of an ongoing effort to provide an excuse to attack Iran. “There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war,” Hersh explains. “The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.”

Hersh would have us believe this scenario did not play out because “you can’t have Americans killing Americans,” an absurd explanation considering the fact the attacks of September 11 were just that — “Americans killing Americans,” a calculated and cold-blooded act of mass murder carried out by elements in the U.S. government as a “new Pearl Harbor,” a cynical pretext to launch the “war on terror,” now grinding into its seventh year.

Ominously, these “ideas” hark back to Operation Northwoods, the JSC plan to stage a false flag terror event — or a number of events — designed to provide a pretext to invade Cuba and take out Fidel Castro. Such “ideas” included “friendly Cubans” attacking the U.S. base at Guantanamo, shooting down a drone disguised as a chartered civil airliner and blaming it on Cuba, inciting riots and staging terror attacks in Miami, and other terrorist acts. Fortunately, then Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, put a kibosh to this insane plan.

"False flag terrorism" occurs when elements within a government stage a secret operation whereby government forces pretend to be a targeted enemy while attacking their own forces or people. The attack is then falsely blamed on the enemy in order to justify going to war against that enemy. Or as Wikipedia defines it:

False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as if they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one's own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and have been used in peace-time; for example, during Italy's strategy of tension.

The term comes from the old days of wooden ships, when one ship would hang the flag of its enemy before attacking another ship in its own navy. Because the enemy's flag was hung instead of the flag of the real country of the attacking ship, it was called a "false flag" attack.

There are many examples of false flag attacks through history. For example, it is widely known that the Nazis, in Operation Himmler, faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. And it has now been persuasively argued — as shown, for example, in this History Channel video — that Nazis set fire to their own parliament, the Reichstag, and blamed that fire on others. The Reichstag fire was the watershed event which justified Hitler's seizure of power and suspension of liberties.

And in the early 1950s, agents of an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind "evidence" implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers). Israel's Defense Minister was brought down by the scandal, along with the entire Israeli government. Click here for verification.

The Russian KGB apparently conducted a wave of bombings in Russia in order to justify war against Chechnya and put Vladimir Putin into power (see also this essay and this report [.pdf]). And the Turkish government has been caught bombing its own and blaming it on a rebel group in order to justify a crackdown on that group. Muslim governments also play this game. For example, the well-respected former Indonesian president claimed that their government had a role in the Bali bombings.

This sounds nuts, right? You've never heard of this "false flag terrorism," where a government attacks its own people then blames others in order to justify its goals, right? And you are skeptical of the statements discussed above? Please take a look at these historical quotes:

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -- U.S. President James Madison

"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." -- Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

What about the U.S.?

Is it logical to assume that, even if other countries have carried out false flag operations (especially horrible regimes such as, say, the Nazis or Stalin), the U.S. has never done so? Well, as documented by the New York Times, Iranians working for the C.I.A. in the 1950's posed as Communists and staged bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected president (see also this essay).

And, as confirmed by a former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence, NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and blamed communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: "You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

Moreover, recently declassified U.S. Government documents show that in the 1960s, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan code-named Operation Northwoods to blow up American airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. The operation was not carried out only because the Kennedy administration refused to implement these Pentagon plans.

For lots more on the astonishing Operation Northwoods, see the ABC news report; the official declassified documents; and watch this interview with James Bamford, the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. One quote from the Northwoods documents states: "A 'Remember the Maine' incident could be arranged: We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

What about Al-Qaeda?

You might think Al-Qaeda is different. It is very powerful, organized, and out to get us, right? Consider this Los Angeles Times article, reviewing a BBC documentary entitled The Power of Nightmares, which shows that the threat from Al Qaeda has been vastly overblown (and see this article on who is behind the hype). And former National Security Adviser [.pdf] Zbigniew Brzezinski testified to the Senate that the war on terror is "a mythical historical narrative."

And did you know that the FBI had penetrated the cell which carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, but had – at the last minute – cancelled the plan to have its FBI infiltrator substitute fake powder for real explosives, against the infiltrator's strong wishes? See also this TV news report.

Have you heard that the anthrax attacks – which were sent along with notes purportedly written by Islamic terrorists – used a weaponized anthrax strain from the top U.S. bioweapons facility? Indeed, top bioweapons experts have stated that the anthrax attack may have been a CIA test "gone wrong." For more on this, see this article by a former NSA and naval intelligence officer and this statement by a distinguished law professor and bioterror expert (and this one).

It is also interesting that the only Congress-members mailed anthrax letters were key Democrats, and that the attacks occurred one week before passage of the freedom-curtailing PATRIOT Act, which seems to have scared them and the rest of Congress into passing that act without even reading it. And though it may be a coincidence, White House staff began taking the anti-anthrax medicine before the Anthrax attacks occurred.

Even General William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, said "By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism, yet in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation" (the audio is here).

Why Does This Matter?

Please read what the following highly respected people are saying:

Former prominent Republican U.S. Congressman and CIA official Bob Barr stated that the U.S. is close to becoming a totalitarian society and that elements in government are using fear to try to bring this about. Republican U.S. congressman Ron Paul stated that the government "is determined to have martial law." He also said a contrived "Gulf of Tonkin-type incident may occur to gain popular support for an attack on Iran." Former National Security Adviser Brzezinski told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation.

The former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, Paul Craig Roberts, who is called the "Father of Reaganomics" and is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Scripps Howard News Service, has said:

"Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging 'terrorist' attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda? ... If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the 'unitary executive' at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of 'national emergency' and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance."

General Tommy Franks stated that if another terrorist attack occurs in the United States "the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government." Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, said "if there is another terror attack, I believe the president will get what he wants. And what he wants is a new Patriot Act, one that will make the current Patriot Act look like the Bill of Rights."

Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter stated before the Iraq war started that there were no weapons of mass destruction. He is now saying that he would not rule out staged government terror by the U.S. government. And British Parliament Member George Galloway stated that "there is a very real danger" that the American government will stage a false flag terror attack in order to justify war against Iran and to gain complete control domestically.

It has long been fashionable among warmongering Christian Zionists to justify the banker-owned "U.S." government's reckless interventionism in the Middle East by suggesting or implying that a policy of non-interventionism would leave poor, defenseless Israel hopelessly vulnerable to (among other things) nuclear attack from countries such as Iraq and Iran.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, stumbled into controversy last night after apparently admitting that his country possesses a nuclear arsenal. Although widely believed to be the only nuclear power in the Middle East, Israel has for decades refused to confirm or deny the existence of a nuclear weapons programme.

But arriving in Berlin for talks with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, Mr Olmert seemed yesterday to undercut the longstanding policy of "strategic ambiguity". He is on a three-day trip to Germany and Italy, to lobby for stronger action to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons.

Asked by a television interviewer if Israel's alleged nuclear activities weakened his argument against Iran's atomic plans, Mr Olmert said: "Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level - when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons - as America, France, Israel, Russia?".

Israeli officials were quick to deny that the comments marked any policy change. Mr Olmert's spokeswoman, Miri Eisin, said he did not mean to say that Israel had or aspired to acquire nuclear weapons.

The CIA first concluded that Israel had begun to produce nuclear weapons in 1968, but few details emerged until 1986 when Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel's nuclear weapons facility, gave the Sunday Times detailed descriptions that led defence analysts to rank the country as the sixth largest nuclear power.

Although Tehran says its nuclear programme is designed solely to generate electricity, Israel has warned that Iran is intent on developing atomic weapons. Mr Olmert told Germany's Spiegel magazine at the weekend that he ruled "nothing out", when asked about the possibility of an Israeli military strike against Tehran.

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line. Carter, who has immersed himself since his presidency in Israeli-Palestinian relations, was highly critical of Israeli settlers on the West Bank, and of Israel's refusal to talk to elected officials of the Islamic party Hamas, although he said that Israel's security was his prime concern.

Carter, whose presidency was dominated by the 444-day siege in which Iran held 52 American diplomats hostage, said "my advice to the US would be to start talking to Iran now" to persuade it to drop its nuclear work. But he cited Israel's nuclear arsenal - and those of the US, Russia, China, Britain and France - in arguing that Iran would find it almost impossible to develop, in secret, many weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

Israel has not confirmed that it has nuclear weapons and officially maintains that it will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Yet the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons is a "public secret" by now due to the declassification of large numbers of formerly highly classified US government documents which show that the United States by 1975 was convinced that Israel had nuclear weapons.

History

Israel began actively investigating the nuclear option from its earliest days. In 1949, HEMED GIMMEL a special unit of the IDF's Science Corps, began a two-year geological survey of the Negev desert with an eye toward the discovery of uranium reserves. Although no significant sources of uranium were found, recoverable amounts were located in phosphate deposits.

The program took another step forward with the creation of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) in 1952. Its chairman, Ernst David Bergmann, had long advocated an Israeli bomb as the best way to ensure "that we shall never again be led as lambs to the slaughter." Bergmann was also head of the Ministry of Defense's Research and Infrastructure Division (known by its Hebrew acronym, EMET), which had taken over the HEMED research centers (HEMED GIMMEL among them, now renamed Machon 4) as part of a reorganization. Under Bergmann, the line between the IAEC and EMET blurred to the point that Machon 4 functioned essentially as the chief laboratory for the IAEC. By 1953, Machon 4 had not only perfected a process for extracting the uranium found in the Negev, but had also developed a new method of producing heavy water, providing Israel with an indigenous capability to produce some of the most important nuclear materials.

For reactor design and construction, Israel sought the assistance of France. Nuclear cooperation between the two nations dates back as far as early 1950's, when construction began on France's 40MWt heavy water reactor and a chemical reprocessing plant at Marcoule. France was a natural partner for Israel and both governments saw an independent nuclear option as a means by which they could maintain a degree of autonomy in the bipolar environment of the cold war.

In the fall of 1956, France agreed to provide Israel with an 18 MWt research reactor. However, the onset of the Suez Crisis a few weeks later changed the situation dramatically. Following Egypt's closure of the Suez Canal in July, France and Britain had agreed with Israel that the latter should provoke a war with Egypt to provide the European nations with the pretext to send in their troops as peacekeepers to occupy and reopen the canal zone. In the wake of the Suez Crisis, the Soviet Union made a thinly veiled threat against the three nations. This episode not only enhanced the Israeli view that an independent nuclear capability was needed to prevent reliance on potentially unreliable allies, but also led to a sense of debt among French leaders that they had failed to fulfill commitments made to a partner. French premier Guy Mollet is even quoted as saying privately that France "owed" the bomb to Israel.

On 3 October 1957, France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 MWt reactor (although the cooling systems and waste facilities were designed to handle three times that power) and, in protocols that were not committed to paper, a chemical reprocessing plant. This complex was constructed in secret, and outside the IAEA inspection regime, by French and Israeli technicians at Dimona, in the Negev desert under the leadership of Col. Manes Pratt of the IDF Ordinance Corps.

Both the scale of the project and the secrecy involved made the construction of Dimona a massive undertaking. A new intelligence agency, the Office of Science Liasons,(LEKEM) was created to provide security and intelligence for the project. At the height construction, some 1,500 Israelis some French workers were employed building Dimona. To maintain secrecy, French customs officials were told that the largest of the reactor components, such as the reactor tank, were part of a desalinization plant bound for Latin America. In addition, after buying heavy water from Norway on the condition that it not be transferred to a third country, the French Air Force secretly flew as much as four tons of the substance to Israel.

Trouble arose in May 1960, when France began to pressure Israel to make the project public and to submit to international inspections of the site, threatening to withhold the reactor fuel unless they did. President de Gaulle was concerned that the inevitable scandal following any revelations about French assistance with the project, especially the chemical reprocessing plant, would have negative repercussions for France's international position, already on shaky ground because of its war in Algeria.

At a subsequent meeting with Ben-Gurion, de Gaulle offered to sell Israel fighter aircraft in exchange for stopping work on the reprocessing plant, and came away from the meeting convinced that the matter was closed. It was not. Over the next few months, Israel worked out a compromise. France would supply the uranium and components already placed on order and would not insist on international inspections. In return, Israel would assure France that they had no intention of making atomic weapons, would not reprocess any plutonium, and would reveal the existence of the reactor, which would be completed without French assistance. In reality, not much changed - French contractors finished work on the reactor and reprocessing plant, uranium fuel was delivered and the reactor went critical in 1964.

The United States first became aware of Dimona's existence after U-2 overflights in 1958 captured the facility's construction, but it was not identified as a nuclear site until two years later. The complex was variously explained as a textile plant, an agricultural station, and a metallurgical research facility, until David Ben-Gurion stated in December 1960 that Dimona complex was a nuclear research center built for "peaceful purposes."

There followed two decades in which the United States, through a combination of benign neglect, erroneous analysis, and successful Israeli deception, failed to discern first the details of Israel's nuclear program. As early as 8 December 1960, the CIA issued a report outlining Dimona's implications for nuclear proliferation, and the CIA station in Tel Aviv had determined by the mid-1960s that the Israeli nuclear weapons program was an established and irreversible fact.

United States inspectors visited Dimona seven times during the 1960s, but they were unable to obtain an accurate picture of the activities carried out there, largely due to tight Israeli control over the timing and agenda of the visits. The Israelis went so far as to install false control room panels and to brick over elevators and hallways that accessed certain areas of the facility. The inspectors were able to report that there was no clear scientific research or civilian nuclear power program justifying such a large reactor - circumstantial evidence of the Israeli bomb program - but found no evidence of "weapons related activities" such as the existence of a plutonium reprocessing plant.

Although the United States government did not encourage or approve of the Israeli nuclear program, it also did nothing to stop it. Walworth Barbour, US ambassador to Israel from 1961-73, the bomb program's crucial years, primarily saw his job as being to insulate the President from facts which might compel him to act on the nuclear issue, alledgedly saying at one point that "The President did not send me there to give him problems. He does not want to be told any bad news." After the 1967 war, Barbour even put a stop to military attachés' intelligence collection efforts around Dimona. Even when Barbour did authorize forwarding information, as he did in 1966 when embassy staff learned that Israel was beginning to put nuclear warheads in missiles, the message seemed to disappear into the bureaucracy and was never acted upon.

Nuclear Weapons Production

In early 1968, the CIA issued a report concluding that Israel had successfully started production of nuclear weapons. This estimate, however, was based on an informal conversation between Carl Duckett, head of the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, and Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Teller said that, based on conversations with friends in the Israeli scientific and defense establishment, he had concluded that Israel was capable of building the bomb, and that the CIA should not wait for an Israeli test to make a final assessment because that test would never be carried out.

CIA estimates of the Israeli arsenal's size did not improve with time. In 1974, Duckett estimated that Israel had between ten and twenty nuclear weapons. The upper bound was derived from CIA speculation regarding the number of possible Israeli targets, and not from any specific intelligence. Because this target list was presumed to be relatively static, this remained the official American estimate until the early 1980s.

The actual size and composition of Israel's nuclear stockpile is uncertain and the subject of many - often conflicting - estimates and reports. It is widely reported that Israel had two bombs in 1967, and that Prime Minister Eshkol ordered them armed in Israel's first nuclear alert during the Six-Day War. It is also reported that, fearing defeat in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israelis assembled 13 twenty-kiloton atomic bombs.

Israel could potentially have produced a few dozen nuclear warheads in the period 1970-1980, and is thought to have produced sufficient fissile material to build 100 to 200 warheads by the mid-1990s. In 1986 descriptions and photographs of Israeli nuclear warheads were published in the London Sunday Times of a purported underground bomb factory at the Dimona nuclear reactor. The photographs were taken by Mordechai Vanunu, a dismissed Israeli nuclear technician. His information led some experts to conclude that Israel had a stockpile of 100 to 200 nuclear devices at that time.

By the late 1990s the U.S. Intelligence Community estimated that Israel possessed between 75-130 weapons, based on production estimates. The stockpile would certainly include warheads for mobile Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 missiles, as well as bombs for Israeli aircraft, and may include other tactical nuclear weapons of various types.

It has long been fashionable among warmongering Christian Zionists to justify the banker-owned U.S. government's reckless interventionism in the Middle East by suggesting or implying that a policy of non-interventionism would leave poor, defenseless Israel hopelessly vulnerable to (among other things) nuclear attack from countries such as Iraq and Iran.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, stumbled into controversy last night after apparently admitting that his country possesses a nuclear arsenal. Although widely believed to be the only nuclear power in the Middle East, Israel has for decades refused to confirm or deny the existence of a nuclear weapons programme.

But arriving in Berlin for talks with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, Mr Olmert seemed yesterday to undercut the longstanding policy of "strategic ambiguity". He is on a three-day trip to Germany and Italy, to lobby for stronger action to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons.

Asked by a television interviewer if Israel's alleged nuclear activities weakened his argument against Iran's atomic plans, Mr Olmert said: "Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level - when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons - as America, France, Israel, Russia?".

Israeli officials were quick to deny that the comments marked any policy change. Mr Olmert's spokeswoman, Miri Eisin, said he did not mean to say that Israel had or aspired to acquire nuclear weapons.

The CIA first concluded that Israel had begun to produce nuclear weapons in 1968, but few details emerged until 1986 when Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel's nuclear weapons facility, gave the Sunday Times detailed descriptions that led defence analysts to rank the country as the sixth largest nuclear power.

Although Tehran says its nuclear programme is designed solely to generate electricity, Israel has warned that Iran is intent on developing atomic weapons. Mr Olmert told Germany's Spiegel magazine at the weekend that he ruled "nothing out", when asked about the possibility of an Israeli military strike against Tehran.

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line. Carter, who has immersed himself since his presidency in Israeli-Palestinian relations, was highly critical of Israeli settlers on the West Bank, and of Israel's refusal to talk to elected officials of the Islamic party Hamas, although he said that Israel's security was his prime concern.

Carter, whose presidency was dominated by the 444-day siege in which Iran held 52 American diplomats hostage, said "my advice to the US would be to start talking to Iran now" to persuade it to drop its nuclear work. But he cited Israel's nuclear arsenal - and those of the US, Russia, China, Britain and France - in arguing that Iran would find it almost impossible to develop, in secret, many weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

Israel has not confirmed that it has nuclear weapons and officially maintains that it will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Yet the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons is a "public secret" by now due to the declassification of large numbers of formerly highly classified US government documents which show that the United States by 1975 was convinced that Israel had nuclear weapons.

History

Israel began actively investigating the nuclear option from its earliest days. In 1949, HEMED GIMMEL a special unit of the IDF's Science Corps, began a two-year geological survey of the Negev desert with an eye toward the discovery of uranium reserves. Although no significant sources of uranium were found, recoverable amounts were located in phosphate deposits.

The program took another step forward with the creation of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) in 1952. Its chairman, Ernst David Bergmann, had long advocated an Israeli bomb as the best way to ensure "that we shall never again be led as lambs to the slaughter." Bergmann was also head of the Ministry of Defense's Research and Infrastructure Division (known by its Hebrew acronym, EMET), which had taken over the HEMED research centers (HEMED GIMMEL among them, now renamed Machon 4) as part of a reorganization. Under Bergmann, the line between the IAEC and EMET blurred to the point that Machon 4 functioned essentially as the chief laboratory for the IAEC. By 1953, Machon 4 had not only perfected a process for extracting the uranium found in the Negev, but had also developed a new method of producing heavy water, providing Israel with an indigenous capability to produce some of the most important nuclear materials.

For reactor design and construction, Israel sought the assistance of France. Nuclear cooperation between the two nations dates back as far as early 1950's, when construction began on France's 40MWt heavy water reactor and a chemical reprocessing plant at Marcoule. France was a natural partner for Israel and both governments saw an independent nuclear option as a means by which they could maintain a degree of autonomy in the bipolar environment of the cold war.

In the fall of 1956, France agreed to provide Israel with an 18 MWt research reactor. However, the onset of the Suez Crisis a few weeks later changed the situation dramatically. Following Egypt's closure of the Suez Canal in July, France and Britain had agreed with Israel that the latter should provoke a war with Egypt to provide the European nations with the pretext to send in their troops as peacekeepers to occupy and reopen the canal zone. In the wake of the Suez Crisis, the Soviet Union made a thinly veiled threat against the three nations. This episode not only enhanced the Israeli view that an independent nuclear capability was needed to prevent reliance on potentially unreliable allies, but also led to a sense of debt among French leaders that they had failed to fulfill commitments made to a partner. French premier Guy Mollet is even quoted as saying privately that France "owed" the bomb to Israel.

On 3 October 1957, France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 MWt reactor (although the cooling systems and waste facilities were designed to handle three times that power) and, in protocols that were not committed to paper, a chemical reprocessing plant. This complex was constructed in secret, and outside the IAEA inspection regime, by French and Israeli technicians at Dimona, in the Negev desert under the leadership of Col. Manes Pratt of the IDF Ordinance Corps.

Both the scale of the project and the secrecy involved made the construction of Dimona a massive undertaking. A new intelligence agency, the Office of Science Liasons,(LEKEM) was created to provide security and intelligence for the project. At the height construction, some 1,500 Israelis some French workers were employed building Dimona. To maintain secrecy, French customs officials were told that the largest of the reactor components, such as the reactor tank, were part of a desalinization plant bound for Latin America. In addition, after buying heavy water from Norway on the condition that it not be transferred to a third country, the French Air Force secretly flew as much as four tons of the substance to Israel.

Trouble arose in May 1960, when France began to pressure Israel to make the project public and to submit to international inspections of the site, threatening to withhold the reactor fuel unless they did. President de Gaulle was concerned that the inevitable scandal following any revelations about French assistance with the project, especially the chemical reprocessing plant, would have negative repercussions for France's international position, already on shaky ground because of its war in Algeria.

At a subsequent meeting with Ben-Gurion, de Gaulle offered to sell Israel fighter aircraft in exchange for stopping work on the reprocessing plant, and came away from the meeting convinced that the matter was closed. It was not. Over the next few months, Israel worked out a compromise. France would supply the uranium and components already placed on order and would not insist on international inspections. In return, Israel would assure France that they had no intention of making atomic weapons, would not reprocess any plutonium, and would reveal the existence of the reactor, which would be completed without French assistance. In reality, not much changed - French contractors finished work on the reactor and reprocessing plant, uranium fuel was delivered and the reactor went critical in 1964.

The United States first became aware of Dimona's existence after U-2 overflights in 1958 captured the facility's construction, but it was not identified as a nuclear site until two years later. The complex was variously explained as a textile plant, an agricultural station, and a metallurgical research facility, until David Ben-Gurion stated in December 1960 that Dimona complex was a nuclear research center built for "peaceful purposes."

There followed two decades in which the United States, through a combination of benign neglect, erroneous analysis, and successful Israeli deception, failed to discern first the details of Israel's nuclear program. As early as 8 December 1960, the CIA issued a report outlining Dimona's implications for nuclear proliferation, and the CIA station in Tel Aviv had determined by the mid-1960s that the Israeli nuclear weapons program was an established and irreversible fact. United States inspectors visited Dimona seven times during the 1960s, but they were unable to obtain an accurate picture of the activities carried out there, largely due to tight Israeli control over the timing and agenda of the visits. The Israelis went so far as to install false control room panels and to brick over elevators and hallways that accessed certain areas of the facility. The inspectors were able to report that there was no clear scientific research or civilian nuclear power program justifying such a large reactor - circumstantial evidence of the Israeli bomb program - but found no evidence of "weapons related activities" such as the existence of a plutonium reprocessing plant.

Although the United States government did not encourage or approve of the Israeli nuclear program, it also did nothing to stop it. Walworth Barbour, US ambassador to Israel from 1961-73, the bomb program's crucial years, primarily saw his job as being to insulate the President from facts which might compel him to act on the nuclear issue, alledgedly saying at one point that "The President did not send me there to give him problems. He does not want to be told any bad news." After the 1967 war, Barbour even put a stop to military attachés' intelligence collection efforts around Dimona. Even when Barbour did authorize forwarding information, as he did in 1966 when embassy staff learned that Israel was beginning to put nuclear warheads in missiles, the message seemed to disappear into the bureaucracy and was never acted upon.

Nuclear Weapons Production

In early 1968, the CIA issued a report concluding that Israel had successfully started production of nuclear weapons. This estimate, however, was based on an informal conversation between Carl Duckett, head of the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, and Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Teller said that, based on conversations with friends in the Israeli scientific and defense establishment, he had concluded that Israel was capable of building the bomb, and that the CIA should not wait for an Israeli test to make a final assessment because that test would never be carried out.

CIA estimates of the Israeli arsenal's size did not improve with time. In 1974, Duckett estimated that Israel had between ten and twenty nuclear weapons. The upper bound was derived from CIA speculation regarding the number of possible Israeli targets, and not from any specific intelligence. Because this target list was presumed to be relatively static, this remained the official American estimate until the early 1980s.

The actual size and composition of Israel's nuclear stockpile is uncertain and the subject of many - often conflicting - estimates and reports. It is widely reported that Israel had two bombs in 1967, and that Prime Minister Eshkol ordered them armed in Israel's first nuclear alert during the Six-Day War. It is also reported that, fearing defeat in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israelis assembled 13 twenty-kiloton atomic bombs.

Israel could potentially have produced a few dozen nuclear warheads in the period 1970-1980, and is thought to have produced sufficient fissile material to build 100 to 200 warheads by the mid-1990s. In 1986 descriptions and photographs of Israeli nuclear warheads were published in the London Sunday Times of a purported underground bomb factory at the Dimona nuclear reactor. The photographs were taken by Mordechai Vanunu, a dismissed Israeli nuclear technician. His information led some experts to conclude that Israel had a stockpile of 100 to 200 nuclear devices at that time.

By the late 1990s the U.S. Intelligence Community estimated that Israel possessed between 75-130 weapons, based on production estimates. The stockpile would certainly include warheads for mobile Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 missiles, as well as bombs for Israeli aircraft, and may include other tactical nuclear weapons of various types.

Last Bill Maher episode was pretty shocking. Bill actually was the only one pointing out how insane it is to look the other way concerning Israel's "moral high ground" with nukes. Hollywood powerhouse Lawrence Bender went out of his way to try and remove the entire discussion from the airwaves. Lawrence Bender is a key part of the illuminazi mind control insanity penetrating our sub-conscience via mass media "entertainment". It was a bit shocking for me to look at his cold and unaffected disposition concerning the very real and present danger of any country using nukes (including Israel).

The Jesse Ventura interview will piss you off because Bill is in complete denial about the 2 party system (since his party is supposedly "winning"). But get to key conversations with Lawrence Bender, I have never seen him on a show and it is important to understand the psyche of these matrix builders.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

US military action against Iran has not been ruled out, a Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday, after a top official said such an option was off the table in the “near term.”

The Defense Department faced questions about US policy on Iran after Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, reportedly said during a visit to Singapore that a strike against Iran would be a “last resort.”

“It is not on the table in the near term,” Flournoy was quoted as saying.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said US strategy over Iran’s nuclear program remained unchanged, with Washington focused on diplomatic efforts to persuade Tehran to abandon uranium enrichment.

Mr. Speaker I rise in opposition to this motion to instruct House conferees on HR 2194, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act, and I rise in strong opposition again to the underlying bill and to its Senate version as well. I object to this entire push for war on Iran, however it is disguised. Listening to the debate on the Floor on this motion and the underlying bill it feels as if we are back in 2002 all over again: the same falsehoods and distortions used to push the United States into a disastrous and unnecessary one trillion dollar war on Iraq are being trotted out again to lead us to what will likely be an even more disastrous and costly war on Iran. The parallels are astonishing.

We hear war advocates today on the Floor scare-mongering about reports that in one year Iran will have missiles that can hit the United States. Where have we heard this bombast before? Anyone remember the claims that Iraqi drones were going to fly over the United States and attack us? These “drones” ended up being pure propaganda – the UN chief weapons inspector concluded in 2004 that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had ever developed unpiloted drones for use on enemy targets. Of course by then the propagandists had gotten their war so the truth did not matter much.

We hear war advocates on the floor today arguing that we cannot afford to sit around and wait for Iran to detonate a nuclear weapon. Where have we heard this before? Anyone remember then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s oft-repeated quip about Iraq: that we cannot wait for the smoking gun to appear as a mushroom cloud.

We need to see all this for what it is: Propaganda to speed us to war against Iran for the benefit of special interests.

Let us remember a few important things. Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has never been found in violation of that treaty. Iran is not capable of enriching uranium to the necessary level to manufacture nuclear weapons. According to the entire US Intelligence Community, Iran is not currently working on a nuclear weapons program. These are facts, and to point them out does not make one a supporter or fan of the Iranian regime. Those pushing war on Iran will ignore or distort these facts to serve their agenda, though, so it is important and necessary to point them out.

Some of my well-intentioned colleagues may be tempted to vote for sanctions on Iran because they view this as a way to avoid war on Iran. I will ask them whether the sanctions on Iraq satisfied those pushing for war at that time. Or whether the application of ever-stronger sanctions in fact helped war advocates make their case for war on Iraq: as each round of new sanctions failed to “work” – to change the regime – war became the only remaining regime-change option.

This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran. I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to turn back from this unnecessary and counterproductive march to war.

TC member unwittingly tells We Are Change activist of plans for world government

Paul Joseph WatsonPrison Planet.comFriday, May 14, 2010

Trilateral Commission member Mikhail Slobodovsici, a chief adviser to the Russian leadership, unwittingly provided a revealing insight into the plans of the global elite during the group’s recent meeting in Dublin Ireland, when he mistakenly told a We Are Change Ireland activist he thought was a fellow TC member that the globalists are planning a war with Iran.

According to Jim Tucker’s fascinating report on the story, Slobodovsici also let slip to We Are Change Ireland’s Alan Keenan that the Trilateralists and their BIlderberg counterparts are intent on exploiting the economic crisis to finalize plans for a world government, but that this agenda is being severely hampered by so-called “nationalists” who are becoming increasingly aware of the impact that global government will have on their freedom and standards of living.

“We are deciding the future of the world,” Slobodovsici told Keenan. “We need a world government,” he said, but, referring to Iran, said “we need to get rid of them.”

“Suddenly, Slobodovsici noticed that Keenan’s nametag was different from the TC label and said: “I can’t talk—we operate under Chatham House rules,” reports Tucker.

Slobodovsici’s position on Iran is both alarming and surprising in equal measure, given that Russia has been generally supportive of Iran’s right to develop a peaceful nuclear fuel program and has directly helped build reactors.

The times may be a-changin’ – at least a bit – with the United States and Israel no longer able to dictate to the rest of the world how crises in the Middle East must be handled, though the new reality has been slow to dawn on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her neocon friends in Congress and the U.S. media.

They may think they are still in control, still the smart ones looking down at upstarts like the leaders of Turkey and Brazil who had the audacity to ignore U.S. warnings and press ahead with diplomacy to head off a possible new war, this one over Iran.

On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced success in persuading Iran to send roughly 50 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for higher-enriched uranium that would be put to peaceful medical uses.

The tripartite agreement parallels one broached to Iran by Western countries on Oct. 1, 2009, which gained Iranian approval in principle but then fell apart.

That Monday’s joint announcement took U.S. officials by surprise betokens a genteel, ivory-tower-type attitude toward a world that is rapidly changing around them, like old British imperialists befuddled by a surge of anti-colonialism in the Raj or some other domain of the Empire.

Tellingly, U.S. officials and their acolytes in the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) could not bring themselves to believe that Brazil and Turkey would dare pursue an agreement with Iran after Clinton and President Barack Obama said not to.

However, the signs were there that these rising regional powers were no longer willing to behave like obedient children while the United States and Israel sought to take the world for another ride into a Middle East confrontation.

Standing Up To Israel

In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was so upset with President da Silva’s advocacy of dialogue with Iran that he gave the upstart from South America a stern lecture. But the Brazilian president did not flinch.

Da Silva had grown increasingly concerned that, without some quick and smart diplomacy, Israel was likely to follow up a series of escalating sanctions by attacking Iran. Mincing no words, da Silva said:

“We can't allow to happen in Iran what happened in Iraq. Before any sanctions, we must undertake all possible efforts to try and build peace in the Middle East."

Turkey’s Erdogan had his own face-off with an Israeli leader – shortly after Israel’s three-week assault on Gaza from Dec. 17, 2008, to Jan. 18, 2009, in which some 1,400 Gazans and 14 Israelis were killed.

On Jan. 29, 2009, the Turkish president took part with Israeli President Shimon Peres on a small panel moderated by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius at the World Economic Summit at Davos, Switzerland.

Erdogan could not abide Peres’s loud, passionate defense of Israel’s Gaza offensive. Erdogan described Gaza as “an open-air prison,” and accused Peres of speaking loudly so as to hide his “guilt.”

After Ignatius allotted Peres twice as much time as he gave Erdogan, the latter was livid, and insisted on responding to Peres’s speech.

The final one-and-a-half minutes, captured on camera by the BBC, shows Erdogan physically pushing Ignatius’s outstretched arm down and out of the way, as Ignatius tries to cut him off with entreaties like, “We really do have to get people to dinner.”

Erdogan keeps at it, refers to “the sixth commandment — Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and adds, “We are talking about killing” in Gaza. He then alludes to barbarity “way beyond what it should be,” and strides off the stage saying, “I don’t think I’ll come back to Davos.”

The Brazilian government also condemned Israel’s bombing of Gaza as “disproportionate response.” It expressed concern that violence in the region had affected mainly the civilian population.

Brazil’s statement came on Jan. 24, 2009, just five days before Erdogan’s strong criticism of the Israeli president’s attempt to defend the attack. Perhaps it was then that a seed was planted to germinate and later grow into a determined effort to move forcefully to prevent another bloody outbreak of hostilities.

And that is what Erdogan did, with the collaboration of da Silva. The two regional leaders insisted on a new multilateral approach to head off a potential Middle East crisis, rather than simply acquiescing to the decision-making from Washington, as guided by the interests of Israel.

So, get over it, boys and girls in the White House and Foggy Bottom. The world has changed; you are no longer able to call all the shots.

Eventually you might even be thankful that some prescient grownups came by, rose to the occasion, and defused a very volatile situation from which no one — repeat, no one — would have profited.

Giving Hypocrisy a Bad Name

One might have even thought that the idea of Iran surrendering about half its low-enriched uranium would be seen as a good thing for Israel, possibly lessening Israel’s fears that Iran might get the bomb sometime soon.

By all rights, the surrender of half Iran’s uranium should lessen those concerns, but the bomb does NOT appear to be Israel’s primary preoccupation. You see, despite the rhetoric, Israel and its supporters in Washington do not view the current dispute over Iran’s nuclear program as an “existential threat.”

Rather, it is viewed as another golden opportunity to bring “regime change” to a country considered one of Israel’s adversaries, as Iraq was under Saddam Hussein. As with Iraq, the selling point for intervention is the accusation that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, a weapon of mass destruction that might be shared with terrorists.

The fact that Iran, like Iraq, has denied that it is building a nuclear bomb -- or that there is no credible intelligence proving that Iran is lying (a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 expressed confidence that Iran had halted such efforts four years earlier) -- is normally brushed aside in the United States and its FCM.

Instead, the fearsome notion of Iran with nuclear weapons somehow sharing one with al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group is used to scare the American public once more. (That Iran has no ties to al-Qaeda, which is Sunni while Iran is Shiite, just as the secular Saddam Hussein despised al-Qaeda, is sloughed off.)

Yet, earlier this year, answering a question after a speech in Doha, Qatar, Secretary Clinton let slip a piece of that reality, that Iran “doesn’t directly threaten the United States, but it directly threatens a lot of our friends, allies, and partners” — read Israel, first and foremost among friends.

Clinton also would have us master the mental gymnastics required to buy into the Israeli argument that, were Iran to somehow build a single bomb from its remaining uranium (presumably after refining it to the 90 percent level required for a nuclear weapon when Iran has stumbled technologically over much lower levels), this would pose an unacceptable threat to Israel, which has 200-300 nuclear weapons along with missiles and bombers to deliver them.

But if it’s not really about the remote possibility of Iran building a nuclear bomb and wanting to commit national suicide by using it, what’s actually at stake? The obvious conclusion is that the scare tactics over Iranian nukes are the latest justification for imposing “regime change” in Iran.

US Begins Massive Military Build Up Around Iran, Sending Up To 4 New Carrier Groups In Region

Tyler DurdenZero HedgeMay 21, 2010

As if uncontrollable economic contagion was not enough for the administration, Obama is now willing to add geopolitical risk to the current extremely precarious economic and financial situation. Over at Debkafile we read that the president has decided to “boost US military strength in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf regions in the short term with an extra air and naval strike forces and 6,000 Marine and sea combatants.” With just one aircraft carrier in proximity to Iran, the Nobel peace prize winner has decided to send a clear message that peace will no longer be tolerated, and has decided to increase the US aircraft carrier presence in the region by a 400-500% CAGR.

A not so secret directive penned by Gen. David H. Petraeus authorizes sending American Special Operations troops into Iran. The directive mentions a wide swath of countries in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa, but is obviously tailored for Iran, the number one target on the Pentagon’s radar.

The New York Times reports that the “secretive” directive is designed to “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” al-CIA-duh and other militant groups, as well as to “prepare the environment” for future attacks by American or local military forces. It authorizes attacks outside of designated war zones and dispenses with informing Congress and the American people.

Petraeus’ order, according to the scribes at the Times, is “meant for small teams of American troops to fill intelligence gaps about terror organizations and other threats in the Middle East and beyond, especially emerging groups plotting attacks against the United States.”

In 2006, the journalist Seymour Hersh reported on U.S. “clandestine activities” (such as blowing up mosques) in Iran. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” a Pentagon adviser told Hersh.

In 2007, Bush issued “secret presidential approval” for the CIA to conduct covert operations in Iran. In 2009, it was reported that Israel had joined in the effort to destabilize Iran. “United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year,” Hersh said in June, 2008. “These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of ‘high-value targets’ in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed.”

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has signaled it will continue to lean on Iran. “U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says an Iranian plan to swap some of its enriched uranium for reactor fuel is a “transparent ploy” to try to avoid new U.N. Security Council sanctions over its suspect nuclear program,” reports the Associated Press this morning. “Speaking in the Chinese capital of Beijing, Clinton said Tuesday the swap offer submitted to the U.N. nuclear watchdog has a number of deficiencies and does not address international concerns about Iran’s atomic ambitions.”

In 2009, the new director of the United Nations’ the International Atomic Energy Agency said there is no evidence that Iran is using its legal nuclear energy program as a cover to develop nuclear weapons. “I don’t see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this,” Japan’s Yukiya Amano told Reuters. The IAEA has consistently said it cannot find evidence of an Iranian nuclear program.

Former Bush speechwriter and neocon David Frum praised the efforts of Democrats to meddle in Iran’s business on Monday. “Impatient with White House inaction, Democrats in Congress are pressing ahead with their own plan for gasoline sanctions on Iran,” Frum wrote for the National Post.

The U.S. has a long history of military intervention around the world. It has dispatched troops to Korea, China, Vietnam, Lebanon, Egypt, Laos, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Cambodia, El Salvador, Grenada, Honduras, Iraq, Panama, Bolivia, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and many other nations. See an exhaustive list here.

The CIA’s operation TPAJAX in Iran deposed the democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953. The “CIA extensively stage-managed the entire coup, not only carrying it out but also preparing the groundwork for it by subordinating various important Iranian political actors and using propaganda and other instruments to influence public opinion against Mossadeq,” writes Mark Gasiorowski.

Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.

In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.

To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.

“The Saudis have given their permission for the Israelis to pass over and they will look the other way,” said a US defence source in the area. “They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [US] State Department.”

Sources in Saudi Arabia say it is common knowledge within defence circles in the kingdom that an arrangement is in place if Israel decides to launch the raid. Despite the tension between the two governments, they share a mutual loathing of the regime in Tehran and a common fear of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “We all know this. We will let them [the Israelis] through and see nothing,” said one.

The four main targets for any raid on Iran would be the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, the gas storage development at Isfahan and the heavy-water reactor at Arak. Secondary targets include the lightwater reactor at Bushehr, which could produce weapons-grade plutonium when complete.

The targets lie as far as 1,400 miles (2,250km) from Israel; the outer limits of their bombers’ range, even with aerial refuelling. An open corridor across northern Saudi Arabia would significantly shorten the distance. An airstrike would involve multiple waves of bombers, possibly crossing Jordan, northern Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Aircraft attacking Bushehr, on the Gulf coast, could swing beneath Kuwait to strike from the southwest.

Passing over Iraq would require at least tacit agreement to the raid from Washington. So far, the Obama Administration has refused to give its approval as it pursues a diplomatic solution to curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Military analysts say Israel has held back only because of this failure to secure consensus from America and Arab states. Military analysts doubt that an airstrike alone would be sufficient to knock out the key nuclear facilities, which are heavily fortified and deep underground or within mountains. However, if the latest sanctions prove ineffective the pressure from the Israelis on Washington to approve military action will intensify. Iran vowed to continue enriching uranium after the UN Security Council imposed its toughest sanctions yet in an effort to halt the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme, which Tehran claims is intended for civil energy purposes only. President Ahmadinejad has described the UN resolution as “a used handkerchief, which should be thrown in the dustbin”.

Israeli officials refused to comment yesterday on details for a raid on Iran, which the Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has refused to rule out. Questioned on the option of a Saudi flight path for Israeli bombers, Aharaon Zeevi Farkash, who headed military intelligence until 2006 and has been involved in war games simulating a strike on Iran, said: “I know that Saudi Arabia is even more afraid than Israel of an Iranian nuclear capacity.”

Bush era Secretary of Defense retread Robert Gates said on Friday Iran has the capacity to “shower” Europe with nuclear missiles. “One of the elements of the intelligence that contributed to the decision on the phased adaptive array (approach) was the realization that if Iran were actually to launch a missile attack on Europe, it wouldn’t be just one or two missiles, or a handful,” Gates told a Senate committee hearing. “It would more likely be a salvo kind of attack, where you would be dealing potentially with scores or even hundreds of missiles.”

Gates said the supposed Iranian threat can be averted by “upgraded missile interceptors” that “would give us the ability to protect our troops, our bases, our facilities and our allies in Europe.”

“The Islamic Republic of Iran’s missile capability has been designed and created for defending the country against military aggressions and not threatening any other country,” Iran’s Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said on Saturday. Vahidi said Gates’ comments are part of a propaganda effort to expand its dominance over Europe and find an excuse to avoid the dismantlement of nuclear arms stationed in the continent, according to The Hindu newspaper. It also serves as part of the ongoing effort to demonize Iran as the U.S. and Israel prepare for an attack on the country.

Iranian National Security Council Secretary Larijani reportedly described the U.S. missile-defense shield for Europe as “the joke of the year,” saying Iranian missiles do not have the range to reach Europe.

Despite the fact tests of the long-range interceptor program have failed over the years due to software and radar problems, the Pentagon in league with the military-industrial complex continue to push the billion dollar boondoggle.

In February, the U.S. attempted to shoot down a ballistic missile mimicking an attack from Iran but failed after a malfunction in a radar built by Raytheon, Reuters reported.

The Pentagon claims Iran will develop missiles capable of hitting the U.S. by 2015. “With sufficient foreign assistance, Iran could probably develop and test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States by 2015,” a report issued by the U.S. Department of Defense states.

Iran’s missile do not have the capacity to reach Brussels where EU leaders are plotting sanctions against Iran (considered by many to be a tacit declaration of war). Iran claims its missiles can reach a distance of 2,000 kilometers. The range would put Athens, southern Italy and the Black Sea coast of new EU members Romania and Bulgaria in range but not central and western Europe. Many consider the claim part of a propaganda effort in the re-election campaign of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year.

In December of 2009 Iran tested another missile. The new missile, the Sajjil-2, has a range of about 1,200 miles and does not threaten Germany, France, Britain, or EU world government headquarters in Brussels.

Iran has no reason to attack Greece, Italy, Romania and Bulgaria. Iran claims it will, however, attack Israel if the country teams up with the U.S. in an attack on Iran.

“They know that, if they try their luck and lob a single missile towards Iran, before the dust clears here, the dust of our missiles will rise from the heart of Tel Aviv,” Mojtaba Zolnour, the acting representative of the Leader in the Islamic Revolution’s Guards Corps., said in April.

In 2008, Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar warned Israel of a “very painful” response if it launched a military strike. “Our armed forces are at the height of their readiness and if anyone should want to undertake such a foolish job the response would be very painful.”

Iran has not made specific threats against Europe, but intellectuals in Israel have. Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician who was imprisoned for revealing Israel’s nuclear weapons program, has said Israel has the ability to “bombard any city all over the world, and not only those in Europe but also those in the United States.”

Martin Van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has been quoted as saying: “Most European capitals are targets for our air force….We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

In 2002, Louisiana State University professor David Perlmutter wrote for the Los Angeles Times: “What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens? For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away — unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans — have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?”

A former Israeli official justified this apocalyptic mindset. “You Americans screwed us” in not supporting Israel in its 1956 war with Egypt. “We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next time we’ll take all of you with us,” said the official.

Iran permitted the U.S. and Israel to score a propaganda victory on Monday when it refused to allow two International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors entry into the country for an inspection of its nuclear program.

Former Mossad boss Shabtai Shavit cites doctrine of pre-emption for attack against Iran.

“This action [banning the inspectors from entering Iran] is in reality a regulatory notice to Amano to be careful so that the agency’s inspectors do not violate the international entity’s charter,” Iran’s state news agency IRNA quoted Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki as saying on Tuesday. “Amano should manage the agency professionally.”

Yukiya Amano took over as head of the agency in December. The Japanese diplomat has adopted a less flexible approach toward Iran than his predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei. On numerous occasions ElBaradei stated there is no evidence Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, said on Monday that the two inspectors made an ”untruthful” assessment of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, according to state media. Salehi added that the ban imposed on United Nations personnel falls under an IAEA “safeguards agreement” and stressed Iran’s commitment to the the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On June 3, Salehi questioned the IAEA’s failure to mention a nuclear fuel swap declaration signed between Iran, Brazil and Turkey in Tehran on May 17, an effort by Iran to demonstrate that it is not secretly using its nuclear energy program to develop nuclear weapons. “Such an approach does not indicate good intentions on behalf of the agency and we hope that the agency will change its approach,” ISNA quoted Salehi as saying.

“It is worrisome that Iran has taken this step, which is symptomatic of its longstanding practice of intimidating inspectors,” U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said following Iran’s action. “This will not … encourage the international community to believe that Iran’s program is peaceful in nature.”

Also on Monday, Congress announced legislation that would block foreign banks that do business with Iranian institutions from gaining access to the U.S. financial system. In addition, Congress has drafted sanctions that would impose third-party sanctions against companies, countries and individuals that deal with Iran’s energy and shipping sectors. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has praised the pending legislation.

A United Nations Security Council resolution passed on June 9 significantly expands sanctions. The resolution envisages a tighter embargo including military, commercial and financial measures.

In April, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas stated the obvious — sanctions imposed on Iran are tantamount to a declaration of war against the country.

“This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran,” said Paul during debate on HR 2194, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act.

“We need to see all this for what it is: Propaganda to speed us to war against Iran for the benefit of special interests,” Paul added.

Earlier this month, gathered at the Dolce luxury hotel in Sitges, Spain, a “special interest” known as the Bilderberg Group signaled its approval of an attack on Iran. “Sadly, Bilderberg remains committed to a U.S. attack on Iran on Israel’s behalf,” Bilderberg hound Jim Tucker wrote on June 10.

On Saturday, it was reported that more than twelve U.S. and Israeli warships, including an aircraft carrier, had passed through the Suez Canal and were headed for Iran.

Meanwhile, in Israel, Shabtai Shavit, a former Mossad boss, has added his voice to the growing chorus in favor of attacking Iran. “I am of the opinion that, since there is an ongoing war, since the threat is permanent, since the intention of the enemy in this case is to annihilate you, the right doctrine is one of pre-emption and not of retaliation,” Shavit told a conference held at the Likudite Bar Ilan University outside Tel Aviv.

Israel pioneered the art of pre-emptive warfare when it attacked Egypt in 1967. As Israeli historian Benny Morris has stated, the Egyptian army did not pose an existential threat to Israel and the Arabs “served as rather bewildered, sluggish punching bags.”

Iran also does not pose a threat to Israel or — as the United States claims — Europe. Iran’s response after the U.S. and Israel attack will not be bewildered and sluggish. It will send missiles into Israel and shut down all shipping in the Persian Gulf.

Back in December, 2009, a story published by The Sunday Times warned that Iran was in the process of developing a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. “Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme,” Catherine Philp wrote for the British newspaper. “An Asian intelligence source last week confirmed to The Times that his country also believed that weapons work was being carried out as recently as 2007.”

As it turns out the story about Iran’s supposed nuclear trigger was not provided by Asian intelligence but more likely the Israeli government with possible help by the British.

“U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a ‘neutron initiator’ for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official,” reports IPS. “Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.”

The bogus claim prompted a new round of support for more aggressive U.S. and European sanctions against Iran. It also underscored a U.S. intelligence report in 2007 concluding that Iran had conducted secret research on building a nuclear weapon until 2003, when its leaders stopped the effort in response to international pressure, according to the Washington Post. European and Middle Eastern analysts claim Iran resumed a nuclear weapon research in 2005.

In lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush regime and its coterie of neocons invented a series of stories claiming Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction. The Bush neocons worked closely with journalist Judith Miller of the New York Times to persuade the American public that Iraq had WMD. Miller’s story about an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes said to be used to develop nuclear material was followed up with television appearances by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice who referenced the fallacious story as part of the basis for invading and occupying Iraq.

The Bush neocons also floated a story about two trailers captured in Iraq by Kurdish troops they said were mobile biological weapons factories. In fact, the trailers were for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council the trailers were evidence Iraq was developing biological weapons.

On July 1, Obama signed a new sanctions bill against Iran aimed at “striking at the heart” of that country’s assumed ability to develop nuclear weapons. “It’s a move the President says he did not seek, but one the Iranian government brought on themselves,” writes Jake Tapper for ABC News. “Mr. Obama says the United States and the international community will continue to increase their efforts to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of Tehran.”

In 2006, a classified draft CIA assessment found no evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons. “The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency,” journalist Seymour Hersh wrote for The New Yorker.

Earlier this year, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Chief Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess said there is scant evidence Iran is building nuclear weapons. “The bottom line assessments of the [National Intelligence Estimate] still hold true,” Burgess said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program.”

Israeli Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam said he believes Iran is not currently capable of developing a nuclear weapon and added that Israel officials who talk about an Iranian nuke within the year are “ridiculous” and asked “where’s the proof?” Eilam is former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission.

After about two and a half years during which the danger of war between the United States and Iran was at a relatively low level, this threat is now rapidly increasing. A pattern of political and diplomatic events, military deployments, and media chatter now indicates that Anglo-American ruling circles, acting through the troubled Obama administration, are currently gearing up for a campaign of bombing against Iran, combined with special forces incursions designed to stir up rebellions among the non-Persian nationalities of the Islamic Republic. Naturally, the probability of a new fake Gulf of Tonkin incident or false flag terror attack staged by the Anglo-American war party and attributed to Iran or its proxies is also growing rapidly.

The failure of the CIA’s Green Movement in Iran gives rise to the tendency to fall back on the previous neocon plan for some combination of direct military attack by Israel and the United States.

The moment in the recent past when the US came closest to attacking Iran was August-September 2007, at about the time of the major Israeli bombing raid on Syria. This was the phase during which the Cheney faction in effect hijacked a fully loaded B-52 bomber equipped with six nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and attempted to take it to the Middle East outside of the command and control of the Pentagon, presumably to be used in a colossal provocation designed by the private rogue network for which Cheney was the visible face. A few days before the B-52 escaped control of legally constituted US authorities, a group of antiwar activists issued The Kennebunkport Warning of August 24-25, 2007, which had been drafted by the present writer. It was very significant that US institutional forces acted at that time to prevent the rogue B-52 from proceeding on its way towards the Middle East. The refusal to let the rogue B-52 take off reflected a growing consensus in the US military-intelligence community and the ruling elite in general that the Bush-Cheney-neocon policy of direct military aggression towards all comers had become counterproductive and very dangerous, running the risk of a terminal case of imperial overstretch.

A prominent spokesman for the growing disaffection with the neocons was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been a national security director in the Carter administration. Brzezinski argued that no more direct military attacks by the United States should be made for the time being, and that US policy should rather focus on playing off other states against each other, while the US remained somewhat aloof. Brzezinski’s model was always his own successful playing of the Soviet Union against Afghanistan in 1979, leading to the collapse of the Soviet empire a decade later. A centerpiece of Brzezinski’s argument was evidently the claim that color revolutions on the model of Ukraine 2004 were much a better tool than the costly and dangerous US bombing and US invasion always championed by the monomaniacal neocons. There was clearly an implication that Brzezinski could deliver a color revolution in Iran, as he had done in Ukraine.

Brzezinski’s Nightmare of 2007 Is Back

Brzezinski formulated his critique of the neocon methods of aggression and imperialistic geopolitics in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 2007, going so far as to point out the likely scenario of a false flag event or Gulf of Tonkin incident designed to embroil the United States in direct military hostilities with Iran. The heart of Brzezinski’s analysis was this: ‘If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.’ Today we could add Lebanon and Syria to that list, plus perhaps Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and some others in central Asia.

The factors contributing to the current increased danger level include three major trends:

According to Michael Hayden, a CIA boss under George W. Bush, Iran’s not having a nuke is just as dangerous as it having one.

Killing Iranians now “seems inexorable” and may not be the “worst of all possible outcomes,” according to Hayden.

Hayden predicted Iran plans to “get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage, so the needle isn’t quite in the red for the international community.” Hayden said that reaching even that level would be “as destabilizing to the region as actually having a weapon” and it will result in an attack by the U.S., Israel, or both.

Killing Iranians now “seems inexorable” and may not be the worst of all possible outcomes,” according to Hayden.

Meanwhile, Iran’s leadership remains steeped in denial. Iran’s ISNA news agency quoted an aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday saying that Israel and the United States would never strike Iran, saying that “both the U.S. and Zionist regime face internal problems and they know that we make many troubles for them if they attack Iranian territory.”

Despite the rhetoric, Iran appears ready to respond in the event of an attack

Yahya Rahim Safav told Iran’s ISNA news agency that Iran’s armed forces were “fully prepared and enemies are aware of that, they do not have the power to take a political decision on the issue, because they know they can start the war but are not able to finish it.”

Mohammad-Ali Ja’fari, commander of the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards, said the United States would not dare to attack Iran as it is fully aware of Iran’s defense power and its nation’s determination, according to Haaretz in Israel.

Ja’fari said that he considered his forces’ preparedness as being at their “highest level,” adding that recent sanctions imposed on Iran would have no impact on Iran’s ability to respond to an attack.

In addition, a former naval chief in the Revolutionary Guard said Iran has set aside 100 military vessels to confront each U.S. warship that poses a threat. The Revolutionary Guard is in charge of defending the country’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf. General Morteza Saffari said Saturday that troops aboard U.S. warships “are morsels for Iran to target in the event of any American threat against Iran.”

“Over recent days, warnings about imminent war and direct calls for war have been proliferating in the world media,” Webster G. Tarpley wrote last week, citing warnings issued by former communist leader Fidel Castro and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Tarpley also cited an editorial penned by former Senator Chuck Robb and former NATO deputy commander General Charles Wald calling for the U.S. to begin preparing an attack. “We cannot afford to wait indefinitely to determine the effectiveness of diplomacy and sanctions. Sanctions can be effective only if coupled with open preparation for the military option as a last resort,” Robb and Wald wrote.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stated that he believes the US, backed by Israel, is preparing to attack two countries in the middle East within months as part of an expansion of the ‘war on terror’.

Ahmadinejad also stated that the attacks would function as a psychological war on Iran, without specifying whether he believed Iran would be physically attacked or how he had reached his conclusions.

“We have precise information that the Americans have devised a plot, according to which they seek to launch a psychological war on Iran,” Ahmadinejad told Iranian state media Press TV.

“They plan to attack at least two countries in the region within the next three months,” he added.

Though Ahmadinejad did not elaborate on which two countries were in US crosshairs, it must be assumed he is referring to Syria and Lebanon – both Iranian allies and both previous targets of US backed Israeli aggression in recent years.

He added that the US has two main objectives:

“First of all, they want to hamper Iran’s progress and development since they are opposed to our growth, and secondly they want to save the Zionist regime because it has reached a dead-end and the Zionists believe they can be saved through a military confrontation,”.

Ahmadinejad’s statements come in the wake of the announcement of new economic sanctions against Iran by the EU, the US and the UN.

“The logic that they can persuade us to negotiate through sanctions is just a failure,” Ahmadinejad said, adding that Iran would “retaliate” against the measures.

Ahmadinejad’s comments also dovetail with a recent build up in saber rattling rhetoric from leading globalist players.

At the weekend, former CIA head General Michael Hayden described a possible attack on Iran as “inexorable”, noting that airstrikes on the country by Israel and/or the US would “not be the worst of all possible outcomes,”.

“Over recent days, warnings about imminent war and direct calls for war have been proliferating in the world media,”Webster G. Tarpley wrote last week, citing warnings issued by former communist leader Fidel Castro and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

Tarpley also cited an editorial penned by former Senator Chuck Robb and former NATO deputy commander General Charles Wald calling for the U.S. to begin preparing an attack. “We cannot afford to wait indefinitely to determine the effectiveness of diplomacy and sanctions. Sanctions can be effective only if coupled with open preparation for the military option as a last resort,” Robb and Wald wrote.

Just last week, a report in Time magazine stated that Israel has managed to convince Washington to put the option of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities back on the table.

Lebanon? That would be my first guess -- war between Israel and Lebanon. Israel is probably salivating over all that natural gas and water. Their true colonialist colors are showing.

I wonder what the other country would be. Syria? Either would start the whole ball rolling because of the defense pact Iran, Hizbollah, and Syria have supposedly signed. Hence the threat of "psywar" from Iran's perspective.

Or could it be two other countries? A bit cryptic, even (maybe especially) for the good doctor (Illuminati puppet).

Reuel Marc Gerecht’s screed in the Weekly Standard seeking to justify an Israeli bombing attack on Iran coincides with the opening of the new Israel lobby campaign marked by the introduction of House resolution 1553 expressing full support for such an Israeli attack.

What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran.

That has long been the Israeli strategy for Iran, because Israel cannot fight a war with Iran without full U.S. involvement. Israel needs to know that the United States will finish the war that Israel wants to start.

Gerecht openly expresses the hope that any Iranian response to the Israeli attack would trigger full-scale U.S. war against Iran. “If Khamenei has a death-wish, he’ll let the Revolutionary Guards mine the strait, the entrance to the Persian Gulf,” writes Gerecht. “It might be the only thing that would push President Obama to strike Iran militarily….”

Gerecht suggest that the same logic would apply to any Iranian “terrorism against the United States after an Israeli strike,” by which we really means any attack on a U.S. target in the Middle East. Gerecht writes that Obama might be “obliged” to threaten major retaliation “immediately after an Israeli surprise attack.”

That’s the key sentence in this very long Gerecht argument. Obama is not going to be “obliged” to joint an Israeli aggression against Iran unless he feels that domestic political pressures to do so are too strong to resist. That’s why the Israelis are determined to line up a strong majority in Congress and public opinion for war to foreclose Obama’s options.

The reason for dropping two nukes on Japan has always troubled me. It has been hard for me to hold to the opinion that it was the only way to get them(the Japanese) to openly surrender. Like wise holding to the opinion that if we did not do it the Russians would have tried to take Japan for themselves has also been hard for me to keep supporting. Judging from the number of important people in US politics at the time strongly advising against dropping any nukes I am sure it was done for some dark terrible reason. Maybe it was done to show the world that America had, and still has, the ability to destroy the world. Maybe it was done to secure America`s place as a super power.

Anyway, now we live in a world which has nuke weapons. America set a dangerous standard that if a nation gets nuke weapons they also get respect. We have a situation in which many nations want to get nukes in order to get respect. What I find funny is that the US Fed government has a crap load of nukes yet wants to make war with any nation trying to get nukes for themselves. It is crazy!

Rep. Charles Rangel may be in trouble because he is your standard corrupt district of criminals opportunist, but that has not killed his mandatory slavery bill. On July 15, Rangel introduced H.R. 5741, the Universal National Service Act, and it was referred to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel on July 23. Even though the bill does not have co-sponsors, it is currently under debate.

“I have introduced legislation to reinstate the draft and to make it permanent during time of war. It is H.R. 5741, and what this does is to make everyone between the ages of 18 and 42 – whether they’re men or women, whether they’re straight or gay – to have the opportunity to defend this great country whenever the president truly believes that our national security is threatened,” Rangel said from the floor of the House.

Rangel specifically said the legislation is designed to be used “during time of war.” On the day before Rangel’s slavery bill went to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, Texas Rep. Louis Buller Gohmert introduced House Resolution 1553. It has since been referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

“Expressing support for the State of Israel’s right to defend Israeli sovereignty, to protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, and to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force if no other peaceful solution can be found within reasonable time to protect against such an immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel,” Gohmert’s resolution states.

Language contained in the resolution condemns Iran “for its threats of annihilating the United States and the State of Israel” (threats Iran has never issued) and supports the use of “all means of persuading the Government of Iran to stop building and acquiring nuclear weapons” (nuclear weapons Iran does not have and does not possess the capability to produce). Gohmert’s bill supports Israel’s “right” to use “all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by Iran.”

In 2007, Mohamed El Baradei, at the time the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iran did not have nuclear material and also stated that the country did not have a weaponization program.

Also in 2007, the National Intelligence Council, where U.S. mid-term and long-term strategic policy is formulated for the intelligence community, stated “with moderate-to-high confidence… Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon.”

“There is no evidence that Iran has made a decision to produce nuclear weapons,” said Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov while speaking out against sanctions on Iran.

In July 21, the day before Gohmert introduced House Resolution 1553, Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said the U.S. and Russia know that Iran does not have any nuclear weapons.

Despite the fact there is no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program and no indication Iran plans to attack Israel, let alone the absurd notion it will attack the United States, Israel and the United States are preparing to attack Iran. The claim Iran plans to attack the United States is ironically reminiscent of the neocon accusation that Saddam Hussein planned to attack the U.S., one of several obvious falsehoods used as an excuse to invade.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel have been shuttling between Washington and Tel Aviv, pushing for crippling economic sanctions that even they concede will not change Iran’s nuclear policy. These sanctions are being put in place, both by the United States and its allies. The open prediction that they will fail is meant to indicate just one thing — military attacks are inevitable,” writes Muhammad Sahimi for PBS. “The rhetorical rationale for attacking Iran keeps coming out of Washington. Most astonishingly, there is a resolution before the U.S. Congress, signed by one-third of the Republican caucus, that urges support for Israeli military attacks on Iran…. The resolution, H. Res. 1553, represents a green light for a bombing campaign. It provides explicit support for military strikes.”

The bomb Iran consensus was underscored late last month when former CIA director Michael Hayden told CNN’s State of the Union that a military attack against Iran “seems inexorable.” Hayden added that in his “personal thinking, I have begun to consider that that may not be the worst of all possible outcomes.” In other words, for Hayden, mass murder is preferable to diplomacy.

“The next step is tough sanctions, economic sanctions. Frankly it’s a last chance for Iran to avoid giving the rest of the world, including the United States, a hard choice between allowing Iran to go nuclear and using military power to stop them from doing that,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman in April.

“We have to contemplate the final option,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., “the use of force to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

“The administration needs to expand its approach and make clear to the Iranian regime and the American people: If diplomatic and economic pressures do not compel Iran to terminate its nuclear program, the U.S. military has the capability and is prepared to launch an effective, targeted strike on Tehran’s nuclear and supporting military facilities,” former senator Charles S. Robb and retired general Charles Wald wrote for the Washington Post on July 9.

Slaughtering innocents is a “terrible thing,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., but “sometimes it is better to go to war than to allow the Holocaust to develop a second time.”

Graham made this ludicrous statement regardless of the fact Iran has never threatened to attack Israel. It is based on a mistranslation of a speech delivered by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad published in the New York Times.

The Times played a big role in the Iraq invasion when Judith Miller published neocon lies about aluminum tubes and other such patently fallacious nonsense. Neocon lies ultimately resulted in the murder of more than a million Iraqis, a total approaching Nazi war crimes.

As should be expected, the neocons figure big in the Iran attack plot now unfolding. “If military force is ever employed, it should be done in a decisive fashion. The Iran government’s ability to wage conventional war against its neighbors and our troops in the region should not exist. They should not have one plane that can fly or one ship that can float.” Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute wrote earlier this year.

In other words, according to neocons over at the criminal organization largely responsible for mass murder in Iraq, Iran should be reduced to a parking lot in order to prevent it from responding to an attack.

Neocon Reuel Marc Gerecht explains how the United States will be sucked into an Israeli-launched attack against Iran. “What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran,” writes historian Gareth Porter.

That has long been the Israeli strategy for Iran, because Israel cannot fight a war with Iran without full U.S. involvement. Israel needs to know that the United States will finish the war that Israel wants to start.

Gerecht openly expresses the hope that any Iranian response to the Israeli attack would trigger full-scale U.S. war against Iran. “If Khamenei has a death-wish, he’ll let the Revolutionary Guards mine the strait, the entrance to the Persian Gulf,” writes Gerecht. “It might be the only thing that would push President Obama to strike Iran militarily….”

Self defense is not an option. If Iran responds to an attack — and its leadership has stated repeatedly it will — the U.S. will become directly involved.

“Gerecht’s argument for war relies on a fanciful nightmare scenario of Iran doling out nuclear weapons to Islamic extremists all over the Middle East. But the real concern of the Israelis and their lobbyists, as Gerecht’s past writing has explicitly stated, is to destroy Iran’s Islamic regime in a paroxysm of U.S. military violence,” writes Porter.

This “paroxysm of U.S. military violence” will undoubtedly call for adding a fresh crop of bullet-stoppers and that is where H.R. 5721 comes into play. As Rangel noted, his bill will provide under government imposed mandate that “everyone between the ages of 18 and 42 – whether they’re men or women, whether they’re straight or gay – to have the opportunity to defend this great country” from imaginary and trumped-up enemies.

Rangel’s bill may never make it out of committee. The attack on Iran, however, is all but a foregone conclusion.

Seductive, fascinating and frightening, Countdown to Zero motivates the public to support complete nuclear disarmament and to fear Iran, which is conveniently the next country the US wants to invade. Framed in no-nuke rhetoric, Countdown to Zero is not-so-subtle agitprop. The film relies on conventional geopolitics to whip up conventional audiences into another conventional state of panic. Islamo-terrorists just can’t acquire this technology! This is painfully similar to what we were told prior to the invasion of Iraq.

In 2002, Condoleezza Rice warned the world, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Invading forces never found weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. They did find plenty of oil, though, which corporations seized for pennies on the dollar. The same reason – WMDs – is now being used against Iran. When Zero mentions Islamo-terrorists seeking nuclear technology, it spotlights Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Repeatedly.

Zero features war hawks Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Baker, and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, as well as spies and analysts, including Valerie Plame. Past or current members of the Carlyle Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations share the screen with well-financed groups ostensibly focused on nuclear nonproliferation.

Some of the film’s talking heads promoted, engaged in and/or profit from the “War on Terror,” which critics deem a euphemism for Western resource wars in the Middle East. James Baker, who served under both Bushes, makes a brief appearance. Until 2005, he legally represented the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm dominated by former heads of state who profit enormously on Middle East wars.

Joe Cirincione of the Council on Foreign Relations (and of Ploughshares, a non-proliferation group) delivers most of the Iran-is-bad message:

“Iran is the tip of the spear. It’s the big problem that we have to solve.”

This marks a 180-degree reversal from his position in 2007 when he described to Asia Times:

“‘a group of people inside the administration who view Iran as Nazi Germany’ and who are ‘constantly exaggerating’ the threat from Iran.”

But that isn’t the only inconsistency.

Nine nations reportedly have nuclear weaponry: the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Of these, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are not current signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

Leaving India and Israel free of criticism, Zero disparages nuclear members Pakistan and North Korea. Key information on these two nations presented in the film conflicts with other information publicly available – in some cases for over a decade.

First keep in mind that invading Iran is part of the “Long War” in which the US and its allies seek control of the entire region for access to its gas, oil and minerals. Long War proponent, Zbigniew Brzezinski, briefly appears in Zero. In 1997, he published The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Among those imperatives is the need to control Iran, a “primarily important geopolitical pivot.”

Iran stands in the way. India does not. Neither does Pakistan or Israel. Brzezinski writes of the Central Asian states:

“Moreover, they are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.” (p.124, emphasis added)

Johannes Koeppl, a former German defense ministry and NATO official, called Grand Chessboard “a blueprint for world dictatorship.” Iran is pivotal in those plans; Zero demonizes Iran. This is precisely the same fear mongering elites used when leading us into war on Iraq.

Zero isn’t even wholly anti-nuke; it only condemns nuclear arms. The film spends time, for example, on the Reagan-Gorbachev nuclear disarmament talks without mentioning what drove Gorbachev to the table: the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion. The Ukraine government reports that the explosion released 100 times more radiation than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Zero doesn’t mention this or any other civilian nuclear accident. The goal is not to ban all nuclear use, even though a nuclear power incident (by accident or sabotage) is just as deadly.

And, it presents absurdities. According to Zero, Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living in Pakistan, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also recently asserted. Never mind that a dialysis-dependent man on the run in rugged terrain for nine years would have likely died by now. Elites refuse to give up their bogeyman.

A closer look into those nations that refuse to sign the NPT reveals different treatment by the US based on corporate investment deals. That difference is reflected in Zero. Though sanctions are applied against North Korea on the grounds it refuses to reach a nuclear accord, the U.S. trades nuclear technology with Israel, India and Pakistan, according to sources enumerated below.

Everyone who is concerned that yet another war in the Middle East could wreck what remains of the United States economy and probably strip away even more of our liberties should be troubled by the numerous calls for war against Iran. No one believes that Iran is anything but a nation that is one small step away from becoming a complete religious dictatorship, but the country has a small economy, a tiny defense budget, and, as far as the world’s intelligence services can determine, neither nuclear weapons nor a program to develop them. Labeling the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a new Hitler and describing the regime as "Islamofascist" is convenient but hardly conveys the reality of the complex political interaction taking place inside today’s Iran. Ironically, the animus directed against Tehran relates not so much to what it is doing as to what its government might do, hardly an adequate pretext for going to war and a standard of behavior that many countries in the world would fail.

A resolution (HR 1553) is making its way through Congress that that would endorse an Israeli attack on Iran, which would be going to war by proxy as the US would almost immediately be drawn into the conflict when Tehran retaliates. The resolution provides explicit US backing for Israel to bomb Iran, stating that Congress supports Israel’s use of "all means necessary…including the use of military force." The resolution is non-binding, but it is dazzling in its disregard for the possible negative consequences that would ensue for the hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic personnel currently serving in the Near East region. Even the Pentagon opposes any Israeli action against Iran, knowing that it would mean instant retaliation against US forces in Iraq and also in Afghanistan. The resolution has appeared, not coincidentally, at the same time as major articles by leading neoconservatives Reuel Marc Gerecht and Bill Kristol calling for military action. Both Gerecht and Kristol insist that action by Israel or the US would be better than doing nothing and both downplay the ability of Iran to counter-attack effectively. One might note that both Kristol and Gerecht have been dramatically wrong in the past, most notably in their analyses of developments in Iraq.

Kristol is a poseur, a foreign policy wannabe, framing policy around his own Straussian beliefs. Gerecht, who actually does know quite a bit about Iran and its internal politics, is the more dangerous of the two as he is able to use his knowledge, which he sprinkles throughout the article, to appear credible. But as is so often the case with the neoconservatives, the thinking is based on false assumptions, optimistic assessments, and leaps of the imagination about what might occur. One might recall neocon predictions of a "cakewalk" in Iraq, a war that still embroils tens of thousands of US troops and that kills Americans nearly every day.

On the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, John Pilger describes the 'progression of lies' from the dust of that detonated city, to the wars of today - and the threatened attack on Iran.

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.

In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.

The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".

Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.

The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.

This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.

Targeting Iran: Is the US Administration Planning a Nuclear Holocaust?

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, August 9, 2010 - 2006-02-22

The US and its allies are preparing to launch a nuclear war directed against Iran with devastating consequences.

This military adventure in the real sense of the word threatens the future of humanity.

While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using "new technologies" and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality.

The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of World Peace. "Making the World safer" is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.

But nuclear holocausts are not front page news! In the words of Mordechai Vanunu,

"The Israeli government is preparing to use nuclear weapons in its next war with the Islamic world. Here where I live, people often talk of the Holocaust. But each and every nuclear bomb is a Holocaust in itself. It can kill, devastate cities, destroy entire peoples." (See interview with Mordechai Vanunu, December 2005).

Realities are turned upside down. In a twisted logic, a "humanitarian war" using tactical nuclear weapons, which according to "expert scientific opinion" are "harmless to the surrounding civilian population" is upheld as a means to protecting Israel and the Western World from a nuclear attack.

America's mini-nukes with an explosive capacity of up to six times a Hiroshima bomb are upheld by authoritative scientific opinion as a humanitarian bomb, whereas Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons are branded as an indisputable threat to global security.

When a US sponsored nuclear war become an "instrument of peace", condoned and accepted by the World's institutions and the highest authority, including the United Nations, there is no turning back: human society has indelibly been precipitated headlong onto the path of self-destruction.

The following article first published in February 2006 under the title Is the Bush Administration Planning a Nuclear Holocaust? Will the US launch "Mini-nukes" against Iran in Retaliation for Tehran's "Non-compliance"?[/url] documents in detail America's doctrine of preemptive nuclear war, including war plans directed against Iran. What is important to underscore is that five years ago, these war preparations were already in an advanced stage of readiness.

The operational procedures for launching a nuclear war under the umbrella of US Strategic Command are examined.

We are at a dangerous crossroads: The decision procedures to use nuclear weapons have been "deregulated" in relaiton to the Cold War era. The new doctrine states that Command, Control, and Coordination (CCC) regarding the use of nuclear weapons should be "flexible", allowing geographic combat commanders to decide if and when to use of nuclear weapons: "Geographic combat commanders would be in charge of Theater Nuclear Operations (TNO), with a mandate not only to implement but also to formulate command decisions pertaining to nuclear weapons." (Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations Doctrine [.pdf])

We have reached a critical turning point in our history. It is absolutely essential that people accross the land, nationally and internationally, understand the gravity of the present situation and act forcefully against their governments to reverse the tide of war.

Michel Chossudovsky, August 9, 2010

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"We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.... This weapon is to be used against Japan ... [We] will use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. ... The target will be a purely military one... It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful."

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable, a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread, in terms of radioactive fallout, over a large part of the Middle East.

All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as "a weapon of last resort" have been scrapped. "Offensive" military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of "self-defense".

The distinction between tactical nuclear weapons and the conventional battlefield arsenal has been blurred. America's new nuclear doctrine is based on "a mix of strike capabilities". The latter, which specifically applies to the Pentagon's planned aerial bombing of Iran, envisages the use of nukes in combination with conventional weapons.

As in the case of the first atomic bomb, which in the words of President Harry Truman "was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base", today's "mini-nukes" are heralded as "safe for the surrounding civilian population".

Known in official Washington, as "Joint Publication 3-12", the new nuclear doctrine (Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations [.pdf], (DJNO) (March 2005)) calls for "integrating conventional and nuclear attacks" under a unified and "integrated" Command and Control (C2).

It largely describes war planning as a management decision-making process, where military and strategic objectives are to be achieved, through a mix of instruments, with little concern for the resulting loss of human life.

Military planning focuses on "the most efficient use of force" , -i.e. an optimal arrangement of different weapons systems to achieve stated military goals. In this context, nuclear and conventional weapons are considered to be "part of the tool box", from which military commanders can pick and choose the instruments that they require in accordance with "evolving circumstances" in the war theater. (None of these weapons in the Pentagon's "tool box", including conventional bunker buster bombs, cluster bombs, mini-nukes, chemical and biological weapons are described as "weapons of mass destruction" when used by the United States of America and its coalition partners).

The stated objective is to:

"ensure the most efficient use of force and provide US leaders with a broader range of [nuclear and conventional] strike options to address immediate contingencies. Integration of conventional and nuclear forces is therefore crucial to the success of any comprehensive strategy. This integration will ensure optimal targeting, minimal collateral damage, and reduce the probability of escalation." (Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations [.pdf], p. JP 3-12-13)

The new nuclear doctrine turns concepts and realities upside down. It not only denies the devastating impacts of nuclear weapons, it states, in no uncertain terms, that nuclear weapons are "safe" and their use in the battlefield will ensure "minimal collateral damage and reduce the probability of escalation". The issue of radioactive fallout is barely acknowledged with regard to tactical nuclear weapons. These various guiding principles which describe nukes as "safe for civilians" constitute a consensus within the military, which is then fed into the military manuals, providing relevant "green light" criteria to geographical commanders in the war theater.

On July 21, the present writer offered the evaluation that an attack on Iran by the United States and Israel was now emphatically back on the agenda after a two-year hiatus.1 More than two weeks after issuing that warning, it is possible to offer a second installment of evidence to buttress the original finding. The author considers that this evidence is now sufficient to confirm the July 21 analysis. The contours of the coming conflagration are becoming somewhat more distinct, and give us reason to fear not just a Middle East regional war, but possibly even a world war, with increasing danger that nuclear weapons will come into play.

Fidel Castro Convokes Parliament, Issues Dramatic War Warning

The most dramatic and outspoken confirmation of the views expressed here on July 21 comes from Fidel Castro, the first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, and the de facto head of state of Cuba. During the spring and summer of 2010, Castro has referred several times to the growing war danger among the United States, Israel, and Iran. On August 8, Castro took the unusual step of convening a special session of the Cuban parliament to discuss the nuclear war danger threatening the peace of the world. Essentially, Castro called for the worldwide mobilization of peace-loving forces to avoid the worst, and included a special personal appeal to Obama.

Castro: Hundreds Of Millions Of Deaths

According to the Cuban News Agency, this war avoidance agenda ‘was the purpose of the Cuban Revolution leader’s address to the Cuban parliament summoned for an extraordinary session in Havana, due to the urgency of mobilizing the world, faced with the danger of a nuclear war that would be triggered by a US-Israeli led aggression on Iran.’ Castro said that Obama, ‘in the instant he gives the order, which is the only one he could give due to the power, speed and countless number of missiles accumulated in an absurd competition between powers, he would be ordering the instant death not only of hundreds of millions of people, including, an immeasurable number of inhabitants of his own country, but also the crews of all US ships in the seas near Iran.” “Simultaneously, the war would break out in the Near and Far East and across Eurasia,” said Fidel. Otherwise, if the war breaks out, the current social order will abruptly vanish and the price will be much higher, Fidel warned.’

Whatever one may think of Castro personally and politically, he is unquestionably one of the longest-serving national leaders in today’s world, and brings to the table his experience during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Castro knows, in short, what a nuclear confrontation looks like from the inside. The American public would do well to put aside the arrogance and impudence of the US mass media and pay attention to why this sick old man is putting so much of his flagging energy into an attempt to alert the world to a danger which is being widely ignored.

US Media Blackout On War News Like Summer 1914

Not surprisingly, the controlled Wall Street news media in the United States did everything possible to trivialize, denigrate and ridicule this dramatic warning. Frivolity and inanity rule US news coverage this summer. The National Socialists had a word for this – Nachrichtensperre, the embargo of real news. To the extent they noticed Castro at all, the US networks focused on the state of Castro’s health, and on the soap opera rivalry between Fidel and his brother Raul, who had replaced him in the presidency several years ago. The account posted on CNN, in particular, avoided any direct reference to the questionable looming nuclear war until an oblique allusion in the final paragraph. The Time magazine article gave the war issue half a sentence, with no elaboration and no explanation. Many newspapers relied on the Associated Press wire account, which did everything possible to downplay the urgency of Castro’s theme. This policy was typical of the attitude assumed by the US media starting several months earlier, which was to assiduously avoid the troubling hard news being generated in the Middle East in favor of an exclusive focus on domestic social wedge issues, including the New York City mosque, gay marriage, and the Arizona immigration law. The result is that the American people, somewhat like many Europeans of August 1914, are essentially living in a dream world, even as the momentum for global tragedy builds up in many corners of the globe. When the shooting started in August 1914, many in Europe were surprised, having thought that the Sarajevo incident of several weeks earlier was no longer a current concern. For those Europeans, the shock of reality came in the form of declarations of war and mobilization decrees. For today’s world, the shock may be even more abrupt.

Gen. Hossein Moghadam, a top Republican Guard official, told the Associated Press Iran has dug mass graves for the bodies of U.S. soldiers in the event Israel and the United States attack. Moghadam said the Republican Guard dug mass graves in the 1980s for Iraqi soldiers when Iran was at war with Iraq under Saddam Hussein, an effort supported by the United States, Israel, and the banksters. The western-instigated war ultimately cost Iran and Iraq around a million dead.

In 1953, the CIA launched Operation Ajax, a coup designed to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected president, Muhammad Mosaddeq. The CIA promptly installed the monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, were trained by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad and were as brutal and terrifying as the Nazi Gestapo in World War II. The CIA provided the Shah and his sadistic secret police with lists of communists and other political dissidents to be tortured and assassinated.

By the late 1970s, the CIA was actively working to depose the Shah and install a radical Islamic government in Iran. In 1980, students in Iran revealed a memorandum from then National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance recommending the destabilization of the Iranian government by using Iran’s neighbors. F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order) and Robert Dreyfuss (Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam) have provided details on this destabilization process. The authors suggest the CIA planned to use Iranian Islamists to destroy the communist forces inside the country, support the CIA’s Mujahadeen (later al-Qaeda) in Afghanistan and spread Islamic fundamentalism in the Soviet Union.

Rockefeller operative Brzezinski met with Saddam Hussein — who would later become the devil incarnate — in July 1980 in Amman, Jordan, to discuss joint efforts to destabilize Iran. For all his cooperation with the CIA, Saddam would suffer a particularly vicious destabilization program that would result in the murder of more than a million of his fellow countryman, including 500,000 children.

George Crile, the CIA actively supported Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war (while Israel covertly supported Iran) in an effort to destroy both countries and create a staggering body count. “We didn’t want either side to have the advantage. We just wanted them to kick the shit out of each other,” said Ed Juchniewicz, Associate Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA at the time, Crile states.

By 2007, the CIA was engaged in black operations inside Iran. In addition to propaganda, misinformation, and financial manipulation secretly signed off on by then president Bush, the agency began working with terrorist groups inside the country. Former UN inspector Scott Ritter and others have documented how the CIA worked with MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq-e Iran) to unleash a wave of bombings inside Iran.

In addition, the U.S. backed (as documented by Rep. Dennis Kucinich) an effort by the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan to kill Iranian security forces. In November 2006, journalist Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker supported this claim, stating that the American military and the Israelis were giving the group equipment, training, and targeting information in order to create internal pressures in Iran.

Under the Bush effort to destabilize Iran, Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations have received ample U.S. largess (Seymour Hirsch’s sources say Bush set aside close to a half billion dollars for the covert terrorist campaign). Since 2008, the scope and severity of the Iran destabilization campaign has increased significantly and includes the participation of not only the CIA but also the Pentagon’s the Joint Special Operations Command.

Hayden, as former CIA boss, is well aware of this sordid history, but his task is to mount the corporate media and further demonize Iran. The attack Iran campaign is now in high gear. Hayden’s propaganda is designed to inculcate the American people to the coming reality of dead babies and further mass destruction in Central Eurasia, a plan long ago sketched out by Zbigniew Brzezinski and the intelligentsia of the New World Order.